Photographers craving the shallowest plane of focus love lenses with wide, bright apertures. If you fit that bill, and use Hasselblad's medium format mirrorless system, the XCD 1,9/80 ($4,845) will have some appeal. It's an expensive, heavyweight prime lens, but one that more than lives up to the renowned Hasselblad name. I've only had a chance to use a pre-production copy, but have some first impressions to share. Worth Its Weight The XCD 1,9/80 is built for medium format photography. Its optics cover a 44-by-33mm image sensor, the type used by the X1D II 50C camera, so it needs more glass than a similar lens for the smaller, more common full-frame (24-by-36mm) sensor format. And extra glass is heavy—the lens weighs in at 2.3 pounds, which is especially weighty when you consider the X1D II comes in at just 1.7 pounds. It measures 4.4 by 3.3 inches (HD) and uses a long, metal lens hood, so it juts out quite from the camera body. Even with the length, the lens is substantial en...
The Hasselblad XCD 1,9/80 lens can blur backgrounds with aplomb, further setting your medium format images apart from the crowd.
Bright f/1.9 aperture; Excellent resolution; Dust and splash protection; Nominal distortion
Heavy; Expensive; Shutter limited to 1/2,000-second exposure