Though the P65+ back produced great image quality, for $42,000 you'd think they'd offer you a better LCD screen.

But before I go into the results, there are some important things to realize about the Phase One P65+ if you are considering making a major, major investment in it. The sensor technology may be impressive, but don't expect to be bowled over by the camera itself.

But let me back up a second and partially revise the previous statement. While it is certainly a beautiful camera that I found to be extremely responsive and well-balanced, both in the hand and photographically speaking, the Phase One 645AF is not the big ticket item in the kit. This model—which is the same as the Mamiya 645AFD III but rebranded for Phase One—is, in reality just a small portion of the $42,000 you'll be spending. In fact, Phase One sells the P65+ back alone for $39,900 while the whole camera system goes for $41,900. You do the math.

We actually liked the understated elegance of the Phase One 645AF camera and appreciated the non-blingy look of the system. Aside from the attractive Phase One case our test unit shipped with and the gleam of the LCD screen on the P65+ back, you'd probably never guess the price tag of this camera system. And that's a good thing since it places the value on image quality and not fancy bells and whistles.

In other ways, there's a frustrating primitivism to this system and to other medium-format digital cameras we've tested recently.

If you're looking for the CompactFlash slot on the P65+, don't overthink it or you may not find it. The slot's hidden behind a basic plastic flap that you have to manually open with a fingernail. Also a curious choice is the cheap rubber cover for the flash sync and multi-connector ports on the left side of the digital back. We quickly mangled that cover—believe me, it's not hard to do—until it wouldn't stay on and instead jutted out awkwardly from the side of the back. (We ended up removing it all together which exposes the ports.)

I know this may sound like I'm nitpicking but it must be said: If you're spending $42,000 on a camera system, you'd expect a bit higher quality on the details.

Other choices we wondered about include the quality of the LCD screen on the Phase One back. With competing studio-worthy digital SLRs such as the 24.5-megapixel Nikon D3X boasting gorgeous 3-inch LCDs that give you a good idea of sharpness and color during playback, the measly, 2.2-inch, low-resolution screen on the P65+ almost seems like a joke.

And lest it sound like I'm picking on Phase One, anyone who's read this column before knows this has been a pet peeve of mine for some time when it comes to digital camera backs. When you're spending this much money on a back, why can't we get a decent-size, high-resolution LCD screen?


OPERATIONAL ISSUES

There are some frustrating operational issues to the P65+ as well. We liked the very basic, easy-to-read menu system, but there are annoying navigation quirks. For one, setting the right file format is tricky and will very likely cause you to shoot in TIFF, which it defaults to, rather than Phase One's .IIQ RAW mode.

This drove us absolutely batty while shooting a series of decorative arts pieces for an advertising campaign at Root's studio in the Macklowe Gallery. We chose the .IIQ L (for large) setting under File Format in the menu, but all of our shots came back as Tiffs when we reviewed them later.

Our mistake, and it's an easy one to make, is that you also need to go into the Configuration menu and then into the File Extension submenu and choose the .IIQ suffix instead of .Tif. We actually had to figure this out on our own since we couldn't find it mentioned in the manual which, incidentally, comes as a PDF on a USB drive. (For $42K, you'd think they'd throw in a paper manual, right?)

(CORRECTION/UPDATE: The .Tif format the Phase One back defaults to is actually a RAW format which just uses the .Tif suffix, not an actual TIFF. Our confusion was that we were able to see the embedded low-res image in the RAW file when looking at it in Photoshop so assumed it was a TIFF. Our bad. But it's still, nonetheless, rather confusing.)

Also, there are some odd title choices for the menu system which might be attributable to a bad translation. (Phase One is a Danish company.)

For example, to format the CompactFlash card you have to go into the Format Disk menu. Well, unless you're using a microdrive with the P65+, and I don't know anyone out there who is anymore or whether that type of storage is even compatible with this back, a CF card doesn't have a "disk" to format, it's flash memory.

Another annoying quirk to the back is that when we went into playback mode to review our shots and then chose the magnify option, pressing the shutter on the camera would not automatically turn playback off as is the case on 99 percent of most cameras out there. Leaving playback on accidentally will drain the battery and this back is a real power sucker. After shooting about 40 images with a fully charged battery, the indicator was already down to half-full.

The last nit we'd like to pick is with the focusing screen in the camera. Yes, it's always a pleasure to look through the giant, full-frame viewfinder of a medium-format camera, but the spartan focusing screen in the Phase One 645AF didn't provide us much to work with when trying to manually focus. It would have been nice to throw in a couple of extra focusing screens with the camera for those wanting something more precise.