Hasselblad / Zeiss Planar CFE 100mm f/3.5

Lay a flat test target down and shoot it against the 80mm Planar that came bolted to most bodies. The 100mm holds its corners while the 80mm gives up a hair at the edges. That flat field is the whole reason the lens exists. Zeiss tuned this Planar for flatness over speed, and on a square negative meant to be enlarged hard, flatness is what wins. It is widely regarded as one of the sharpest lenses in the Hasselblad V system, especially for flat-field and infinity work, which is the job it was built for.

It carries the Planar name, the family Zeiss has been refining since Paul Rudolph drew the first one in 1896, but this is a simplified, Planar-derived design optimized for a flat plane of focus rather than the textbook six-element double-Gauss. Corner-to-corner performance wide open at f/3.5 is unusually strong for the system, biting across the full 6x6 frame while most normals are still tightening up. Stop down to f/8 and resolution climbs to where film grain, not the lens, is usually what limits the print. Contrast runs high, color sits neutral in the usual T* way, and flare stays buried even when you shoot toward a light source.

This is not a portrait lens, and pretending otherwise is the fast way to be disappointed. It is two-thirds of a stop slower than the 80mm, the field is so flat that a close face can read as clinical, and the out-of-focus rendering is smooth and neutral rather than the swirl-and-glow some people go looking for. The real audience is landscape, architecture, copy and repro work, and anyone who wants every line on a 56mm square to count. It takes 60mm filters, the same as most of the late CF/CFE line, so a polarizer or an ND slides straight over from your other barrels.

The leaf shutter is the practical argument for staying in the CF/CFE world at all. It runs from a full second to 1/500 and syncs flash at every one of those speeds, with no focal-plane ceiling to work around. When Zone Light Meter hands you a slow shutter for a dim interior, the whole range is there down to one second, and because it is a leaf design you can drop fill flash in at any of those speeds instead of being pinned to a single sync point.

On the used market the CFE version carries a premium over the older C and CF 100mm lenses, partly for the late T* glass and partly for the Databus contacts that let it meter on the 200-series bodies. It is one of the few V lenses people hunt down by name instead of accepting whatever shipped with the camera. Slow, single-minded, expensive, and worth it if your one purpose is resolution.