Conclusion

There is difference, Hasselblad produced slightly more details and color was more balanced to a girl skin tone. On a first sight the difference in image details seems to be so minimal that it will be hard to notice it. However, more I look at these images, more I see the difference in fine details: look at hair, areas under her eyes, etc. Twice as big 16 bit Hasselblad sensor delivers more texture and colors over 14 bit Nikon sensor. It is simply a matter of physics: 6 micron v.s 4.7 micron of a pixel size, and much larger sensor area along with additional color information (16 bit v.s 14 bit) makes a difference.

However, I have never seen such a great details and resolution in $3200 35mm DSLR before! Will it be any visible difference between large prints from both cameras? May be, if we’ll look at those prints with the loupe. But how many idiots use loupe to enjoy large prints? :-))

Second test, Underexposure and Shadows recovery

For this test I’ve set a “normal” exposure for the test shot and then dialed lighting 4F stop down (from 180 total Ws to 12Ws) without touching camera’s exposure controls.

Note: I found Nikon to be slightly more sensitive (about 0.5 F stop) than Hasselblad, so I had to adjust the lighting to get exposure as close as possible on both cameras.

First hiccup with Adobe camera RAW converter:

To test underexposure recovery, I started from using ACR to convert camera RAW files, knowing that the latest ACR does an amazing job of pulling details out of camera RAW. However, it appears that it was not the case for Hasslblad: simply adjusting exposure to +2 or higher was producing a tremendous amount of noise in dark areas. Basically I was using a combination of exposure, highlights and shadows to pull the best result. Even when I tried to use a noise reduction (and I am not suppose to do this by test rules), it did not help much.

The surprise was when I tried to convert Hasselblad raw files in Phocus software: what a difference! It pulled much better details and less noise levels without loosing much of details. I did not touch anything else except exposure and recovery sliders.

When I tested Nikon ViewNX the same way, I did not find any difference between it and Adobe ACR, so I used View NX for underexposure recovery tests as well.

Below are results. “Before” is un-adjusted, camera default RAW conversion, and “Ater” is my recovery attemt by using exposure and highlights/shadows sliders.

Nikon D800E: Underexposed and recovered, full shot