I have to ask, is there no one else who finds the Haselblad X1D interesting? By all means, read Ming Thein’s articles on this new camera.
Ming Thein is paid by Hasselblad. His remarks are worth as much as any other advertisement.
As to your question, I do not find the X1D interesting for three reasons.
The first is the cost: as sensors get bigger, performance increases linearly with the sensor diagonal (
http://www.photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm#Ideal%204/3,Ideal%20CX,Ideal%20DX,Ideal%20FX), but the cost is proportional to the square of the sensor diagonal. Small improvements in sensor performance cost a lot of dollars/euros. It is not just that I don't want to spend that much on a camera, it is that spending those dollars on a slightly bigger sensor is a poor choice: a fraction of the cost of the X1D and a couple of lenses would buy much larger improvements spent elsewhere - eg on a better tripod and head.
The second issue is the lack of lenses. That is not just a start-up issue: there will never be a long focal length lens or a fast portrait lens, because of the choice to use leaf shutters
and have fast shutter speeds. The reason to have leaf shutters is, of course, to synchronise with flash at any shutter speed, and the reason to do that is so you can use flash to stop very fast action
without turning off the lights. I can see that might be useful, once or twice, although the number and low price of the Schneider-Kreuznach leaf shutter lenses for Mamiya 645 on the second-hand market suggest that there may be less market for pictures of women being splashed with milk than a lot of folk hoped. Whatever, that makes the X1D a studio camera.
That leads to the third issue: the X1D is a fundamentally irrational concept. It is a studio camera, so why have all the things that make a studio camera functional been ditched to make it small and light?
