Pixiq

Medium and large format films always represented sort of a fringe genre, reserved for professionals, students, and very serious hobbyists, and then only a sampling of them. The cameras and lenses were expensive, it took a certain amount of tech-savvy to load the film properly, it was expensive to develop and even more prohibitively so to have prints made. But if you did everything right and chose your prints carefully, the image quality sure made it worth the effort. I never took a better photo than with an old, borrowed Pentax 645. 

Camera manufacturers like Mamiya and Hasselblad began to produce medium format digital cameras fairly early on in the digital game, which were worth about as much as your car. Nowadays, well, they're still on par with some cars, but one die-hard, old-school manufacturer comes to the rescue with a professional-as-always, affordable, backwards-compatible answer for those of you who have always wondered, "How dare they refer to 24 X 36 mm as 'full-frame?'" Unfortunately, the Pentax 645D is only available to you if you've been wondering that in Japanese--for now, at least. In Japan, a person can purchase this awesome new 40-megapixel, 44 x 33-mm sensor camera for around US $9500.

Everyone cross your fingers for a US release, because Mamiya and Hasselblad's 44 x 33-mm sensor, 40-megapixel cameras will cost a cool twice-as-much. And, not to be ignored in a conversation about digital cameras with gigantor sensors, Canon recently announced their latest contribution to digital imaging innovation: The world's largest (202 x 205 mm) CMOS sensor! But, start saving if you'd like to toss one of these in your kit, because, while no official price exists yet, according to Wil Milan at Tech News Daily, it is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and unlikely to come down anytime soon.