LEAF VOLARE
First showing of the new
Scitex back at Seybold San Francisco
by John Henshall
The Scitex Leaf Volare is a new
high-quality digital camera back for colour still life and
studio photography. It couples to Sinarcam, Hasselblad,
Mamiya or Fuji 645 and uses the same 24 x 36mm format 2048 x
3096 pixel (6 Megapixel) CCD -- made by Philips -- as the
Dicomed LittleBigShot. Phase One and Sinar have also
announced camera backs using this chip. Together, they show
a major move away from the Loral Fairchild 2048 x 2048 chip,
which was first used by Leaf in 1992.
The Volare is a three shot system for
producing highly detailed still-life images of extremely
high quality, achieved by reading red, green and blue
information from the entire CCD and thus eliminating
interpolation. The main eye catcher of this camera back is a
purple lever which rotates the CCD to shoot either
vertically or horizontally at the flick of a switch,
eliminating the need to rotate the camera physically. This
feature is known as 'Leaf VHtwist'. Another feature of the
Volare is the Leaf Active Cooling System, which constantly
adjusts the temperature of the CCD, helping to maintain
clean, noise-free images in hot and sticky studios. Areas of
the image may be magnified to full resolution and a new
large graphical focus indicator in the software interface
makes focussing from a distance much easier.
Leaf are big players with long experience
at the top of the professional camera market. The $25,000
Volare should be another big success.
This article
first appeared as "John Henshall's Chip Shop" in "The
Photographer" magazine, October 1998.
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