H1

Settings you can read with the power off

The shutter speed dial runs from 1 s to 1/4000 s in full stops, with B and A. The ISO dial sits on the left shoulder, where your thumb finds it without looking. Exposure compensation covers plus or minus three stops in thirds. Set any dial to A and the camera takes over that one value, nothing else.

There is a front command dial for apertures on adapted lenses and for menus, and a rear dial that moves the focus point. The rear screen tilts 90 degrees up and 45 down, and stays flush when closed.

An offset viewfinder

The electronic viewfinder sits at the top left corner of the body, so your nose clears the back of the camera and your right eye stays free. It is a 3.69-million-dot OLED panel at 0.72x magnification, with a refresh rate of 120 Hz in the high-performance mode.

Stabilised, sealed, and quiet

Five-axis sensor-shift stabilisation gives up to 5.5 stops of correction with the HV 40 mm, measured to the CIPA standard. Thirty-eight gaskets seal the body. The mechanical shutter is damped and rated for 200,000 cycles. Switch to the electronic shutter and the H1 makes no sound at all.

A sensor without a low-pass filter

The H1 uses a back-side illuminated 36 x 24 mm sensor with 40.2 effective megapixels and no optical low-pass filter. It records 14-bit raw files as DNG, so they open in any current raw developer without waiting for an update.

Base ISO is 64. Our colour team in Copenhagen tuned five colour profiles and two monochrome profiles by hand, against prints rather than screens.

Video, when you need it

The H1 is a stills camera first. It records 4K at up to 30p in 10-bit 4:2:2 internally and Full HD at 120p. There is a 3.5 mm microphone input and a micro HDMI port.

Full technical datasheet