Tag Archives: Hasselblad CFV II 50C

HASSELBLAD 907X…WITH HASSELBLAD V SERIES LENSES?

Leave a Reply

JUNE 2019

My last post was about the recent Hasselblad product announcements and particularly about the slim little ‘body’, that Hasselblad is calling the 907X.

That’s the 907X….the little bit in the middle, mated to the new CFV-II 50C and a XCD lens. (Hasselblad’s product photo)

The Hasselblad press announcement stated that it would be able to take, in addition to the obvious XCD lenses from the X-1D camera, the H Series lenses and also the ancient V Series.

Here’s a look at what I think that means.
Hasselblad, along with others like FotoDiox, Klipon and Cambo, have all been making Hasselblad lens adapters for sometime. But let’s start with the Hasselblad adapters currently for the X-1D camera.

This is the Hasselblad X to H lens converter, currently available for the X-1D camera.

Hasselblad’s XH lens adapter.

This guy’s going to let you use the HC and HCD lenses from the big H Series cameras. That is the range of cameras that ran from the original H1 and H2 film cameras, which became H1D and H2D digital versions and then into the H3D model which has continued on to the latest H6D. I think there are 12 lenses available that fit those cameras. These have all been built by Fuji as the Hasselblad association with Zeiss ended with the V Series.

The adapter is fairly big and when mounted on that little waif of a 907X body plus the CFV digital back, it’ll almost be as big as any other ‘normal camera’ in your hand.
With this adapter you will have control of the HC/HCD lenses built-in leaf shutter, aperture and auto focusing…all from the buttons on the back I guess although the new side grip looks like adding ‘more buttons’.

Hasselblad also stated the 907X would be able to use the old Zeiss V Series lenses.
Now they produce an adapter to do that currently for the X-1D camera as well.

Hasselblad XV lens adapter.

The film plane was some distance away because of the V series mirror, so this adapter moves the lens well away and is pretty big. However it adds the ability to mount all those Zeiss Distagon, Planar, Tessar and Sonnar lenses on the 907X, which will be very interesting to behold.
The XV adaptor shown here is currently available to get your V Series lenses onto an X-1D. Sadly in doing that you have to give up the leaf shutter built into each of the Zeiss V lenses and you have to enable the use of the electronic shutter built in the in the X-1D body.
Oh dear…that’s not great as the electronic shutter takes about 300mSecs to sweep over the sensor, thus making it useless for moving objects. You also don’t get any other ‘auto’ facilities, so manual focusing, exposure etc but that was to be expected with V Series manual lenses. The full range of flash sync speeds that a leaf shutter also gave are also gone…
But hey…I’m a manual sort of guy…I’d get by.

It’s difficult though to see how this XV adapter would work with that little 907X at all unless the 907X was getting an electronic shutter…or maybe even the CFV-II 50C would get the electronic shutter? I believe that Phase One have incorporated one into a digital back already.


Well suprisingly things weren’t always this crude….Hasselblad had already built a ‘better’ adapter for mounting V Series lenses…this time is was for the H Series bodies. This one was an even more serious device as it had the ability to use the leaf shutter in the V lens and also control of the aperture.

The rather more complex Hasselblad CF adapter…V Series lenses to H series cameras.

They called this the CF adapter. This is what Hasselblad said: “The automatic focusing system in the H Camera can be used to guide the manual setting of focus through the use of the focus confirmation signal displayed in the viewfinder. Light is measured at full aperture with all lenses, which produces an aperture and shutter speed data display in the camera for the manual setting of the exposure. Owners of CFE version lenses receive an additional benefit as the preset aperture setting is automatically transferred to the camera. Shutter cocking is performed manually with all lenses and is quickly accomplished by an easily accessible lever on the side of the adapter.”
So users of this earlier H Series adapter get the following with their V Series lenses:
Normal use of the built in leaf shutter, which they can cock with a lever…along with those higher flash sync speeds which are still manually set on lens from 1s–1/500s including B and T mode and no use of a laggy electronic shutter. There’s light metering at full aperture and electronic focus confirmation on the viewfinder display .
The databus connection with the late CFE lenses operates and is past through to the camera.

I wonder therefore if this more complex adapter could comeback in a new form to be used on the 907?

****************************************************************

HASSELBLAD 907X – THE NEW SUPER WIDE C?

Leave a Reply

JUNE 2019

Hasselblad just made a set of surprise announcements. They are going to be selling a Mark 2 version of their most beautiful looking digital camera to date, the X-1D. It has a better touch screen and I do hope it will fix some of the things they omitted when the original X-1D came out. I hope they’ve remembered that photographers need a proper ‘remote release’…you can’t rely on being tethered to remotely fire a camera. Also they must fix the small built in delay the camera suffers from. Pressing a shutter must be instant!

I think this is the most beautiful looking camera…ever! Well done Hasselblad!
Now in addition to updating it…..perhaps you’ve fixed somethings…oh and cut the price!


Although staying with the 50Meg pixel resolution, the X-1D also gets another new lens…fine, but the best news for ‘old dinosaurs’ like me who love their old V Series film cameras is that we haven’t been forgotten.
The long standing CFV range of Hasselblad digital backs were brought up to date a few years ago when the CFV-50C model appeared giving us the 50Meg pixel CMOS detachable back. An expensive option at the time, although it was dropped in price…. but then it was discontinued when all of the Sony 50Meg chips went to the new X-1D production. I thought it had ‘gone forever’!

Now the CFV-50C detachable back returns and gets an big update, with bigger, brighter flip screen and a better set of controls that mimic the X-1D functions.
All Medium Format backs are ‘cropped’ as no manufacturer will make a 6×6 cm square back. So compromises give us at best a nearly ‘645 format’ or something well under it
It’s not easy to turn a square format designed V Series camera, even with a prism on it, so will they make the new back ‘rotatable’? It doesn’t look like it. I can shoot in either ‘landscape or portrait’ with the very old Leaf Aptus digital back I have but the Hasselblad CFV-50’s were always stuck in ‘landscape’.

Now I usually use a 1997 Hasselblad 501CM or an even older 1970’s 500CM and also love the very odd camera that Hasselblad originally called the ‘Supreme Wide’ or ‘Super Wide’. The model I have is the SWC/M CF version from 1982. The development of this camera came from Victor Hasselblad’s desire in 1954 to have a really wide angle camera, but wanting to use the Zeiss 38mm Biogon lens. It’s an outstanding true wide-angle design and not a retro-focus. This lens has almost no barrel distortion and ‘back in the day’ it was indeed a ‘supreme wide angle’. Now though it’s perhaps equivalent to a ‘full frame’ 21 or 24 mm lens I guess.
Alas it requires a very short distance between the film plane and the back of the lens and could not accommodate the usual Hasselblad reflex mirror. It also came with no viewfinder and relied on an external finder to approximate the cameras view and even had no rangefinder…all very crude, even then!

My SWC/M is like this, pictured by Richard Nordin in his seminal book ‘The Hasselblad System Compendium’…which along with the Fifth Edition of Ernst Wildi’s book ‘The Hasselblad Manual’, every V Series user should own.

My love for the images this SWC camera makes is why the last announcement really intrigues me! They’ve announced something called the Hasselblad 907X. This firmly ties it to the ‘Super Wide C’ line…as the last models ever built of those were designated 903 and 905.

That’s the 907X in the picture below. The ‘sliver of a body’ just squeezing in between the new detachable CFV II 50C back and one of the existing line of XCD, or even HC lenses. The XCD’s are from the X-1D cameras and the HCD and the HC lenses are from the current ‘big Hassy’ digital cameras…The ‘H Series’.

Now that’s really beautiful too. Hasselblad’s own picture of a pre-production 907X with CVF II 50C back and a 45mm HCD lens.
Have Hasselblad ‘gone and lost the plot’ with their model naming! All these ‘II’ versions are stupid…you can’t even type Roman numerals easily! Why not CVF-50D and X-1E?

So the 907X is similar in concept to Victor Hasselblad’s original 1954 ‘SWC’ design…but in a digital form…and now with a removable lens. An ‘old dinosaur’ like me hasn’t been able to get a true wide angle when using a digital back on the V Series as the crop factor meant the widest 40mm Zeiss on a V camera was somewhat cut off. The 907X will take the 21 and 35mm XCD wide angle lenses now of course and you use the tilt screen and buttons on the new CFV II 50C back to control it. The ring around the shutter button allows exposure changes I believe.

There was also no fun in putting a CFV-50C back on the SWC camera, as the ‘microlenses’ used within the back caused fringing at the edges of the image….although to be honest the ‘microlenses’ problem only came about well into the development of Medium Format digital backs. My 12 year old Leaf Aptus does work well on my SWC/M camera, although it’s still cropped of course.

The press release also mentions old V Series lenses as being adaptable to the new 907X, but they’d have to improve the current software correction for it to be for all the V Series lenses to make that really good I think.

The 907X is so ‘basic’ that it’ll come with an external viewfinder…just like the SWC did and also with a handgrip giving ‘more buttons’. I’m dying to see it….particularly since Hasselblad have apparently dropped prices.

******************************************************************************