Mamiya has announced the shipping date for its new Mamiya ZD medium format camera.

The professional grade camera, which integrates DALSA's 22 million pixel image sensor chip, will be available in Japan on December 21st, 2005, and will be released worldwide in January 2006.

The Mamiya ZD is the world's first medium format digital SLR camera that is both fully integrated and portable.

Medium format cameras are used extensively by commercial photographers for advertising, wedding, portrait, and landscape work.

Its built-in 22 Mega Pixel 36mm x 48mm Dalsa CCD image sensor is 2 times the size of full 35mm D-SLR sensors and 3 times the size of standard D-SLR sensors.

Influenced by the popular Mamiya 645AFD, the Mamiya ZD digital camera body incorporates the 645AF lens mount. Now Mamiya 645AFD shooters can continue to enjoy the image quality that only Mamiya world-class AF lenses can offer directly on the new Mamiya ZD digital camera.

Data transfer from the Dalsa CCD sensor is processed in real- time with its exclusively designed Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC). The advantage to the photographer is that image data captured from the sensor is optimized for fast performance.

With a frame capture rate of 1.5 fps, the producer claims that it's the fastest 22 Megapixel digital Medium format camera in the industry.

The Mamiya ZD provides card slots for both Compact Flash (CF) and Secure Data (SD). Approximately 100 images in Mamiya RAW format can be stored onto a 4GB CF card.

Another interesting feature is the innovative cartridge type removable Low-Pass filter (optional) which gives Mamiya ZD digital back photographers a choice, depending on shooting conditions, whether to use the filter or not.