Hasselblad XPan 45mm f/4

Fujifilm built this, not Hasselblad. The XPan that arrived in 1998 was a Fuji design start to finish, sold in Japan as the TX-1 and wearing the Hasselblad badge everywhere else. The 45mm f/4 was the lens it shipped with, and it carries the whole concept: a 35mm rangefinder that switches mid-roll between an ordinary 24x36 frame and a 24x65 panorama nearly twice as wide. To cover that long frame, the Fujinon optics throw an image circle most 35mm lenses never attempt.

On a standard frame the 45mm reads as a normal lens, close to what your eye sees. Flip to panorama and the same glass becomes a wide horizontal sweep, a little over 70 degrees across, with none of the stretched-corner distortion you get faking the look with a true wide-angle. That is what you are paying for. The perspective stays honest; only the crop gets long.

Optically it earns its keep. Center sharpness is strong at f/4 already, with the firm contrast and clean color Fujinon was known for. The corners of that huge panoramic frame are another matter wide open. Stop down to f/8 or f/11 and they snap into line, which is where landscape shooters live anyway.

The honest weakness is light falloff. Spread a frame 65mm wide and the edges go dim, plainly visible at f/4 against an even sky. Hasselblad sold a center filter to even it out, darker in the middle than at the rim, and it works, but it costs you about a stop to a stop and a half of light. Screw one onto the 49mm thread and dial that filter factor into your meter before you trust the reading; Zone Light Meter folds the compensation straight into the exposure. Skip the filter and you learn to stop down or frame so the dark corners land on something that hides them.

Because it was the kit lens, the 45mm is the common one, which in XPan money still means expensive. The system turned into a cult object once film came back, and a clean body with this lens trades for serious cash now; the 30mm ultra-wide is the unicorn that costs more than the camera, and the 90mm sees far less use. Travel and landscape photographers chase the format for the obvious reason, but plenty of street shooters run the 45mm wide open and accept the slow speed for that 2.7:1 strip. Few other systems switch formats mid-roll on a single negative. Software stitching gives you the shape, but you give up the one-exposure negative this lens was built around.