I'm curious to know if anyone has had experience with very high end airbrushes with models. I currently use mid-range DA airbrushes, a gravity feed Paasche and siphon feed Badger that can produce pencil lines under just the right conditions. The finest nozzles I use are around .25 mm to get that kind of result.
There are very high end tools such as the Badger Sotar, Iwata micro or Harder & Steenbeck that are used by illustrators and have nozzles approaching .1mm. Videos on line show illustrators doing drawings with them in which they are laying down hair-thin rather than pencil-thin lines.
The thing is these illustrations are, of course, done on forgiving absorbent surfaces like paper, at very close distance and using very thin inks or other mediums. One of the videos shows the artist using ink that was thinned to 1 drop ink per 8 drops water, and the top H&S model, to do a drawing of a dog's face with hairs individually drawn with the airbrush. In modeling we are using non absorbent surfaces such as plastic or primer and mediums that are thick enough to be opaque. When I try to do a detail on plastic that is smaller than a ball point pen line, the thinned paint sometimes gets blown around on the surface, even at 5 psi.
Aside from the quality action of these upper end ABs it would be interesting to know if anyone has actually been able to, or needed to exploit the capabilities of these types, as opposed to a typical mid-range tool. For example, is it easier to "dial-in" consistently fine work with a top end model? I can afford to upgrade if I wanted but am not sure that the benefit is significant.