Mamiya ZD – A Piece of History

I have standardised on the Olympus E-M1 mark II for a lot of my travel photography but I am constantly concerned that 20Mp is not sufficient for my needs. After all, if you visit a beautiful city for the first time and have the opportunity to capture, say, the Florence skyline at sunset, then would you wish for more megapixels than 20? I would, but of course life is a compromise and you need to weigh up the resolution limitations versus the very compact proportions of a micro four thirds system. And of course, the E-M1 has a fantastic high-resolution mode which I hope to review in the near future.

So while I was recently contemplating the question of “Is 20Mp enough?”, which is a question I ask myself way too much, I thought of the 20-or-so megapixel cameras that I used to use day in, day out not so long ago and which were the standard resolution of the professional fraternity at that time.

Enter the Mamiya ZD, at 22Mp it was the very first medium format digital SLR camera ever developed. At the time these cameras were first launched I actually owned two of them, and I have now just the one shown here which has ended up spending its miserable life locked away in an air-tight storage case. I like to get it out and shoot a few shots once in a while just to stop it from seizing up, and to have the pleasure of handling it. I keep it mainly for sentimental reasons of course but also for the fact that it really is an amazing piece of photography history.

When I shot this image I was actually in the process of shooting some comparisons between it and the Olympus E-M1ii. I was secretly hoping that the ZD would yield superior results, that the ZD’s colours and dynamic range would blow the tiny little sensor of the E-M1ii out of the water. But it didn’t. Not at all. They were very comparable. And I was left realising just how much technology has advanced that a sensor of so tiny proportions can hold its own against a 48x36mm medium format CCD sensor of the same resolution.