Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E Review

Our Recommendation

The Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E is an unusual lens in many ways. It is made of the highest-quality materials, yet lacks a manual focus switch. It is the first “E” lens that Hasselblad has made, yet it uses an earlier leaf shutter that maxes out at 1/2000 second. It does a great job minimizing distortion and chromatic aberration, yet has among the highest vignetting we’ve ever seen. Overall, it’s a lens of contradictions that nevertheless opens up new doors to Hasselblad users who can afford it.

From our lab tests, the elephant in the room with the XCD 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E is certainly the high vignetting. When I loaded the vignetting results, I was very surprised at what I saw – not just because the numbers were so high, but because it didn’t really match my subjective impression of the lens.

The discrepancy, I realized, is because I personally didn’t take a lot of photos with this lens where vignetting was the worst – namely 20mm, f/3.5, and infinity focus. Instead, I was often shooting a little further zoomed in, focused closer, and substantially stopped down. There, the vignetting was low enough as to be irrelevant most of the time. It is really Milky Way photographers who have the most to worry about and who should look into other lenses instead.

Here’s how I’d sum up the pros and cons.

Pros:

• Excellent build quality and materials
• Very strong corner sharpness
• Chromatic aberration and distortion are unusually low for an ultra-wide zoom
• Strong flare resistance, coma performance, and overall sharpness
• Internal-zooming design is better protected against the elements
• Reasonable in size and weight for what you get
• Easy ability to use screw-in filters, unlike many ultra-wide zooms

Cons:

• At 20mm, among the worst vignetting we’ve seen in a lens
• Loud autofocus that, on my copy, would sometimes get stuck at close focus distances
• Very few handling-related controls such as an AF/M switch or custom control ring
• Use of Hasselblad’s 1/2000-second leaf shutter rather than their new 1/4000-second leaf shutter
• $5929 MSRP is high even for Hasselblad

Like I said on the first page of this review, there is no real alternative to the Hasselblad 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E at the moment. It is not just Hasselblad’s widest lens, but also their only ultra-wide zoom. And it does perform, in certain ways, how you would expect of a nearly $6000 Hasselblad lens – impeccable materials, sharp from corner to corner, minimal chromatic aberration, and so on.

Maybe that’s the context in which you would want to overlook the unusually high vignetting and the missing handling features of the 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E. Or maybe it only makes those drawbacks more glaring. In any case, at a personal level, I find myself feeling less impressed by this lens than I expected for the price and the brand, despite some of the lens’s notable positives.

Certainly, it is still an excellent optic in many ways. Putting the 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E on one of Hasselblad’s 100-megapixel sensors likely captures more detail than any other camera + wide-angle zoom combination available today. But even then, I can’t help feeling that the drawbacks of the lens are too significant given the price. Whether they will matter to your photography is another question, but I don’t think they can simply be overlooked.

Conclusion

The Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E is available for $5929 through our affiliate B&H:

• Hasselblad 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E at B&H

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The next page of this review has some more sample photos from the Hasselblad XCD 20-35mm f/3.2-4.5 E, followed by reader comments on the final page. Use the Table of Contents below the star rating to jump to the section you want.