Hasselblad / Zeiss Sonnar C 150mm f/4 (chrome)

The real rival is its own descendant. Set the chrome 150 Sonnar beside the later black T* version of the same lens and almost everything matches: the Sonnar formula, the 6x6 coverage, the short-tele reach that works out to roughly an 85mm in 35mm terms. What separates them is the coating and the shutter, and the chrome trades for a fraction of the price. That gap is why people still buy the old one.

The Sonnar layout was Ludwig Bertele's answer to flare in the years before multicoating, fewer air-to-glass surfaces than a Planar, and on 6x6 it lands at the classic head-and-shoulders length. Wide open at f/4 the center is already sharp with a gentle, rounded falloff into the background. This is a portrait lens and it behaves like one, isolating a face against a wash of out-of-focus tone without the nervous edges some fast lenses leave behind. Stop down to f/8 or f/11 and the whole frame snaps to, with detail that holds well past what you need for a print. On 6x6, 150mm is the length a lot of V-system shooters reach for when they want a tight head-and-shoulders frame, and this lens is why.

The weakness is baked into the date. This chrome version is single-coated, built before Zeiss brought T* multicoating to the line in the mid-1970s. Aim it into a window or a low sun and the contrast goes soft, with veiling flare and bloom around bright edges. Use the shade hood and it is well-mannered. Shoot it backlit without one and you are fighting it the whole roll.

It is a leaf-shutter lens, the Synchro-Compur built into the barrel, so it syncs flash at every speed up to 1/500. That is the real appeal for studio and location portraits. You can pull the ambient down with shutter speed and lay strobe on top at any setting, with no focal-plane sync ceiling to respect. Meter the ambient in Zone Light Meter, set the aperture for the depth of field you want on a face, and flash sync holds wherever the shutter lands. One thing to plan around: it takes the Hasselblad Bay 50 bayonet filter, not a screw thread, so budget for a dedicated bayonet ND or a Bay-50-to-screw adapter if you want to open up outdoors.

Today it is one of the cheaper ways into Zeiss Hasselblad glass, and that price is most of the appeal. Buyers cross-shop it against the T* CF 150 and against the 180mm f/4 CF, which has a strong reputation for portraits in its own right. The catch with any chrome lens this old is the shutter. Sixty-year-old Synchro-Compurs gum up, and the slow speeds (one second, a half) stick first, so budget for a CLA unless the seller has paperwork. Find a clean one and you get the rendering of a much pricier lens for portrait money, with a character the multicoated versions sand slightly smooth.