Should I Buy a Medium-Format Digital Camera?

I get asked this question a lot; so often, I will write a general response. This doesn’t replace the personalized advice that I have given and will continue to give, but it will add to it.

For whom is this article intended? I’m thinking of someone who already owns an interchangeable lens full frame (FF, or 24x36mm), and has at least several years of experience in using that gear. If all your previous photographic experience is with your cellphone, this piece isn’t for you, and a full-frame digital camera will probably be a better fit for you than a medium format camera.

What’s a medium-format digital camera? The term “medium format” comes from the film era, and traditionally referred to formats larger than miniature format (24x36mm, 24x32mm, or 24x18mm negatives or transparencies on 35mm film stock) and smaller than images on 4×5-inch sheet film. Today, when referring to digital cameras, it almost always means any format with sensor image dimensions greater than 24x36mm.  Medium-format cameras are thin on the ground compared to FF ones, and almost all of the medium-format digital cameras currently being manufactured use 33x44mm sensors made by Sony. Pentax still makes a single-lens reflex camera that uses a 33x44mm sensor, but their product line has been stagnant for years, and I don’t expect further MF DSLR developments from them. As far as I know, there are no fixed lens 33x44mm sensor cameras being made, and no other MF DSLRs. Thus, the main choices for a newly manufactured MF camera boil down to either the Hasselblad (X series) or Fujifilm (GFX) mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras (MILCs).

What do you get when you lay down a full-frame camera and pick up a medium-format one? I will generalize, ignoring some special cases:

Greater resolution. You can buy 50 MP GFX and X1D cameras, but you’ll be missing out on some of the greatest benefits from the format if you’re already using a 40-60 MP full-frame camera. The 100 MP resolution of the GFX 100x and X2D cameras can not only allow more detail but also serve to mitigate aliasing. Cameras with greater resolution can allow more cropping for the same print size than cameras of lower resolution, but my cropping position has always been: if you often crop your images in both directions, you are either using the wrong equipment for the subject, or you’re not planning the shoot as well as you should.

Dynamic Range. Current CMOS sensor technology provides effective full well capacities of about 3000 electrons per square micrometer. If you use FF equivalent focal lengths and f-stops with your MF camera, and can double the time your shutter stays open, you will have a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in same-size prints that’s about half a stop better than you’ll get with a full-frame camera. If you are limited to the same shutter speed, you’ll see about the same SNR.

Better lens performance at equivalent apertures. This is by no means guaranteed, but all else equal, it’s easier to design and manufacture slower lenses than fast ones, so there is likely to be less vignetting and higher resolution off-axis on the MF lenses.

4:3 aspect ratio. Whether this is a plus or a minus depends on your esthetic choices. I like 4:3, 4:5, and 1:1 aspect ratios, so a 4:3 aspect ratio lets me use more of the capture than the 3:2 aspect ratio of an FF camera.

Leaf shutter. The Hasselblad XCD lenses all have leaf shutters, which can have advantages when using strobe lighting, but can also suffer from strange bokeh at high shutter speeds.

What do you lose?

Lens selection. If you’re using a mirrorless camera like the Hasselblad X series, the 907X, or the GFX cameras, you can use many third-party medium format lenses and even quite a few lenses made for FF cameras. With the Hasselblads, you’ll be stuck with the very slow scanning electronic shutter, but with the GFX cameras, you can use the EFCS or fully mechanical focal plane shutter. But you won’t be able to use lenses made for mirrorless FF cameras, and you will usually lose autofocus entirely or suffer from decreased AF performance. With a camera like the Sony Alpha 1/7/9 series or the Nikon Z-mount cameras, there are many more lenses you can use.

Autofocus performance. Modern stacked-sensor FF cameras are miles ahead of medium format ones when it comes to properly focusing on dynamic subjects like birds and sports. They’re also better for active children.

Frame rate. Some modern medium format cameras are capable of frame rates that full frame cameras would have been proud to be able to do a few years ago, but stacked sensors in full frame cameras have raised the bar so high that MF cameras can’t get there. There are currently no consumer stacked-sensor medium format cameras.

Lack of a mechanical focal plane shutter. The Hasselblad X-series cameras have no focal plane shutter, which means that you are likely to get rolling shutter effects when adapting lenses with no leaf shutters to the camera.

Weight, size, cost. Usually, but not always, medium format cameras will be heavier, larger, and more expensive than comparable full-frame cameras.

Where do the medium format advantages become significant?

The most important place is when making large prints. You’re not going to see much difference between, say, a GFX 100S II capture and one from a Nikon Z8 displayed full format on a 4K monitor or even in a 16×20 inkjet print. But in a 30×40-inch print, with the right subject and good technique, you’ll see a difference. For most web usage, equivalent images from the two systems will appear virtually identical. There is a future-proofing argument to be made here; you may not make large prints now, but you may want to do that someday. You may not have a 16K monitor now, but you may get one someday.

For a great many people, the full frame camera is the way to go. You’ll save some money, get a much larger lens selection, enjoy snappy response and responsive autofocus. But for those who want the ultimate image quality, print large, have deep pockets, and can live with medium format limitations, they can be great cameras.

Author: Jim Kasson

I’ve been a photographer since high school, and an electrical engineer all of my professional life. The two things came together for a while. From 1989 until the middle of 1995, I worked as an IBM Fellow at the Almaden Research laboratory south of San Jose, CA. For those six years, my principal area of research was color management, color processing for digital photography, and color transformations such as gamut mapping. At other times in my career, I researched speech recognition and speech bandwidth compression and developed data acquisition and process control computer systems, telephone switching systems, and data communication systems. I retired in 2000, and for the last 22 years when I’m not serving on NFP boards unrelated to photography, I’ve been spending most of my free time making photographs.