Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 Review

Focusing Characteristics

The Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V autofocuses very accurately, even in a demanding lab environment. Focusing speed, especially in low light, is somewhat limited by the capabilities of Hasselblad’s cameras. Still, I would consider it more than adequate for what photographers would want with an ultra-wide lens. Just don’t expect to be autofocusing on the stars.

While this lens is quite impressive for Milky Way and nightscape photography, you do need to resign yourself to focusing manually if the light gets too low. And, at the moment, one downside of Hasselblad’s cameras is that the live view magnification option does not go as far as you might like. It’s plenty for most types of photography, but not for attaining critical focus on the stars. Some trial and error is definitely needed for pinpoint accuracy at f/2.5 – though it can be done with some practice if your eyes are up to the task.

Distortion

A small downside of the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V is that it has moderately high distortion, measuring -3.11% barrel distortion in our lab. While this is certainly not the most distortion that we’ve ever seen on a wide-angle lens, it’s high enough that you’ll generally want to correct it if there are straight lines in your photo.

Here’s a simulation of -3.11% barrel distortion:

Keep in mind that Hasselblad currently does not have the option of in-camera distortion correction. You can always fix it in post-processing, but note that this will slightly crop your composition from how you framed it in the field. My recommendation is to compose a little wider than usual if you know that you’ll need to correct distortion later.

Vignetting

In uncorrected images, the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V has high levels of vignetting (falloff) that doesn’t totally go away as you stop down. It also seems to have a subtle bluish color cast. Vignetting on this lens is worse at close focusing distances compared to infinity – which is uncommon, although it’s also what we saw when testing the Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V.

In any case, here’s the full chart showing how much light the 25mm f/2.5 V loses in the corners:

The maximum vignetting wide open is 2.84 stops, which is quite high. The good news for Milky Way photographers is that infinity focus has less vignetting than close focus, and that result (2.46 stops) isn’t much higher than we usually see with wide-angle, wide-aperture lenses.

However, it’s disappointing that the vignetting doesn’t improve very much upon stopping down. You’ll find yourself needing to correct vignetting with this lens in many of your photos, unless you like how the corner darkening focuses your viewer’s eye toward the center of the photo (which you certainly might).

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

There is a reasonably small amount of lateral chromatic aberration on the Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V. It gets a little worse as you stop down, but never reaches high levels. Here’s the chart:

Astute Photography Life readers may notice that the graphic design of the chart above is a little different than usual. This is a sign that the numbers above are not to be compared against our full-frame chromatic aberration tests on Photography Life.

We measure chromatic aberration in pixels, and the sensor used for this test was a 100-megapixel medium format sensor (the Hasselblad 100C, found on cameras like the CFV 100C and the X2D). On such a demanding sensor, measuring at most 1.4 pixels of chromatic aberration is a great result. And the performance from f/2.5 to f/5.6 is simply excellent.

Sharpness

The Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V is a very sharp lens. Testing it both in the field and in the lab, there were no areas of its sharpness performance that gave me pause – I was happy using it on a 100-megapixel medium format sensor without feeling like I was losing any meaningful detail.

Note that the MTF test below is not comparable to any existing full-frame lens review on our website. Normally, all of our full-frame lens reviews can be compared against one another (even across camera brands – we account for that), but that does not hold true with such a different sensor size and resolution as this.

In other words, no meaningful conclusions can be drawn between the numbers in the chart below versus the numbers in our existing full-frame reviews! I want to get that out of the way first and make it clear to anyone who wants to try – I promise that you won’t learn anything useful.

Even so, testing in the lab is useful because it reveals which aperture values are the sharpest on this lens in various regions of the frame. Here are the full results:

As you can see, the sharpest aperture in the center and corners is f/4, although the midframes are a bit sharper at f/5.6. All told, the whole range from f/2.8 to f/8 is really strong, and even wide open at f/2.5, this is a sharp lens. (It’s pretty sweet for the corners at f/2.5 to match the corners at f/11, which is often where corner sharpness is highest on medium format gear.)

The closest comparison that I’ve made in the lab is to test the Hasselblad XCD 38mm f/2.8 V – obviously a different focal length, but it’s the second widest XCD V lens and a pretty natural comparison to make. Here’s how that lens performs:

The two lenses are on a pretty similar level. The 38mm lens attains a higher maximum central and corner sharpness, but the 25mm lens reaches higher in the midframes. None of these differences are particularly great, either – generally less than 10%, which is about the threshold that an eagle-eyed viewer can spot sharpness differences at high magnifications.

Here’s an image from the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V on a 100-megapixel sensor, followed by a 100% crop, to demonstrate the sharpness that can be attained with this lens.

And a 100% crop from the trees on the left-hand side of the image, representing about 1% of the area of the photo. Only Lightroom’s default sharpening has been applied. Click to see full size:

Here’s another example, this time at f/11 with a pair of crops from different portions of the frame:

Again, click the following images to see them full size. These are approximately one-megapixel excerpts from the 100-megapixel image, sharpened only with Lightroom’s default sharpening.

The results above are as good as any wide-angle lens I’ve seen. Suffice to say that this lens is unlikely to be the limiting factor in the sharpness of your photos – it’s more likely that you’ll run into depth of field or diffraction issues before the lens runs out of sharpness.

As a final note, there is a bit of focus shift on the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V, but it only kicks in as you stop down to at least f/5.6 and beyond. At those apertures, depth of field tends to be large enough that a little focus shift is not a big deal.

Coma

Related to sharpness is coma, a lens aberration that can make dots of light in the corner of a photo look like smears. Coma isn’t usually visible in everyday photography, but for something like Milky Way photography, it can be a factor. Since the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V is geared toward Milky Way photography, I was eager to put its coma performance to the test.

Shown below are extreme crops from the top-right corner of the Hasselblad X2D with the 25mm f/2.5 V. I cropped the X2D’s 100-megapixel sensor down to 1262 × 946 pixels and didn’t do any resizing; these are direct excerpts from the image, with Lightroom’s default sharpening and noise reduction applied. First, here’s the original image and the crop box for reference:

Now we’ll look at the 100% crops at f/2.5, f/2.8, and f/3.2. Click the images below to see them at full size.

There’s hardly any coma here at all, even at f/2.5 – an excellent result! While I see a very slight improvement at f/2.8, there doesn’t seem to be a further improvement at f/3.2, just a little extra noise. To me, this is a lens to shoot at either f/2.5 or f/2.8 when photographing the Milky Way.

Sunstars and Flare

Complex wide-angle lenses like this one can be hotbeds of flare and ghosting. Considering how often the sun ends up in your frame at such wide angles, I consider this to be one of the most important aspects of image quality for wide-angle lenses.

Impressively, the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V has hardly any flare and ghosting! Even when the sun is directly in the frame, so long as the front element of the lens is completely clean, flare is very well-controlled.

Here’s how it performs shooting directly toward my phone’s LED flashlight at f/16 – no flare in sight at all:

By comparison, the 38mm f/2.5 V – hardly a bad lens where flare is concerned – performs a little worse:

Even this result is great, with the biggest line of “flare” on the right-hand side of the 38mm photo actually more like a sunstar that got out of hand. (The 25mm f/2.5 occasionally experiences this as well, and the fix is to shoot at a slightly wider aperture.) These two lenses make the test look easy, but try pointing any other lens at your phone’s flashlight for 20 seconds, and you’ll find that this level of performance is pretty rare.

In any case, the Hasselblad 25mm f/2.5 V does a great job in backlit situations. It also gives some very nice eight-pointed sunstars. I have no concerns using this lens even when the sun is in the frame.

The next page of this review sums up everything and explains the pros and cons of the Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V. So, click the menu below to go to “Verdict”: