Hi, my name's Malc and I'm an addict. My sad addiction is/was to 'ultimate 35mm photographic quality' and, judging by the correspondence on this site, I'm far from alone (it's great to be among so many friends though!). For years I've been chasing that elusive dream: I've bought all the magazines, digested the reviews, scoured the net - I can recite photodo, (in fact it's my mantra: "Planner 45G = 4.7, Planer 35G = blah, blah, blah". I just love comparing MTF charts and then there's the thrill of planning the system, the endless upgrades, the huge overdraft, the countless hours spent over a light table with a high powered loupe desperately searching for perfection. Been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt (several times). You too? Yeah, I thought so...
So what would you say if I told you I'd found a cure and it worked? You'd be interested, right? Just think of all the money you'd save - and you might actually have time to get out and take some pictures - yeah, I know it sounds incredible, but it's true. I can remember the day it happened; getting the envelope in the post, turning on the light table and looking, astonished... ....at my first roll of 645 film!
I guess that's where the joke ends, but I can see some of you are just too far gone to believe me, so I'll be blunt: every shot I've ever taken in MF is superior in terms of detail and resolution to every shot I've ever taken in 35mm (I'm 30+ years a photographer so that's a lot of film). There's just no contest, good quality medium format pisses on even best quality 35mm every time. Why? It's not just that the format is physically bigger, but that, for a given field of view, the image is bigger too. A normal lens in any format is roughly the same as the diagonal measurement of the format, so 43mm for 35mm, something around 70mm for 645. Obviously, a 70mm, being a longer focal length than 43mm, will produce a significantly bigger image. It doesn’t matter which format you use, this is always true.
My years as a slave to ‘ultimate 35mm quality’ mean that I know that the best 35mm lenses probably have superior resolving performance (judged in line pairs per mm for ex&le) to most, if not all MF lenses. But in my experience, it isn’t enough to make up for the format size difference. Okay, you could use your G2 with ultra slow fillm, tripod mounted and with the lens set to its optimum aperture and, yes, on a 12x8 inch enlargement, you might not be able to tell the difference to a 645 using normal film etc. But, other than to prove a pedantic point, why would you bother?! If you use the same film and settings, the difference should be noticable by 11x14 inch. Why? Because for 35mm, it’s something like a 12x enlargement, but for 645 only about 8x. When it comes to photographic quality, size wins, every time. And the bigger you go, the more obvious this becomes. To go back to the original post, yes, the G lens is probably 'sharper' but not by enough to make up for the differnce in format (I can only assume that Michael's friend had a poor Mamiya lens).
But this doesn’t mean that MF is always better than 35mm. It’s all about ‘horses for courses’. I can’t tell you how liberating it was to make this discovery, simple though it was. Now, if I want to play at being Cartier Bresson I reach for my G2; if I’m on holiday taking snaps I use my T3; for butterflies and nature work I use my Nikon F100 and a macro, while for landscapes, or where I can take my time, I use my large format camera with a 6x9 roll film back. Frankly, these days, I don’t care whether Leica M or Zeiss G make better lenses. The only thing that matters to me is whether the camera is fit for purpose, suits me and delivers quality that’s ‘good enough’.
There’s a lot of rubbish talked about whether 35mm can match MF, and a lot of time wasted on the subject. It would be great if we could get on to something more interesting… but I’m not holding my breath.
Enjoy your photography! }Best wishes Malc