Our Recommendation
The Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V lives up to its promise. It’s a highly capable lens for Milky Way photography thanks to the bright maximum aperture, wide focal length, and minimal levels of coma. It also makes a great general-purpose wide lens with impressive sharpness and excellent flare performance. And while it is quite an expensive lens in a vacuum, $3700 is pretty typical for Hasselblad XCD V lenses, and it’s not like you’re buying into this system if you’re sensitive on price.
That said, the lens does fall into some of the usual pitfalls of wide-angle, wide-aperture glass. It has more distortion than most prime lenses, and vignetting is definitely on the high side at narrow apertures. Both distortion and vignetting can be corrected in post-processing (certainly more easily than correcting something like coma), so I can’t knock the lens too much on those counts. But it’s still higher than expected for such an expensive lens.
Here’s how I’d sum up the pros and cons.
Pros:
- Excellent build quality and materials
- Seamless handling with useful controls
- Hasselblad’s newest and most advanced leaf shutter
- Best-in-class flare performance
- Excellent sharpness across the frame
- Hardly any coma even wide open
- Relatively small and light, especially considering the performance
Cons:
- Ease of focusing on the stars is limited by Hasselblad’s current cameras
- Significant vignetting that doesn’t diminish much upon stopping down
- Relatively high barrel distortion
- $3700 MSRP, though not unusual for Hasselblad, is still high for a wide-angle prime
All told, the positives of this lens definitely outweigh the negatives, if you find the price acceptable. For the level of performance that it reaches – not to mention the great features like the ultra-fast leaf shutter – the rest of the compromises are pretty reasonable.
My only question is whether Hasselblad’s XCD 28mm f/4 might not be a better buy. Although it’s more than a full stop slower, it’s also less than half the price, size, and weight. And despite not being an XCD V lens, it actually does have Hasselblad’s upgraded leaf shutter, so you can still use it at a flash sync speed of 1/4000 second. Even for Milky Way photography, the 28mm f/4 could be a reasonable option, since you can always use image averaging to get exceptionally low noise in your Milky Way photos at f/4.
I leave that for you to decide. Certainly, the Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V is a fantastic lens. It’s sharp and well-built, and it’s arguably the most advanced wide-angle lens that Hasselblad has ever made. If the $3700 price doesn’t deter you, you really can’t go wrong with the XCD 25mm f/2.5 V.
Conclusion
The Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V is available for $3700 through our affiliates:
- Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V at B&H
- Used/International: Check prices on eBay
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The next page of this review has some more sample photos from the Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V, followed by reader comments on the final page. Use the Table of Contents below the star rating to jump to the section you want.
Hasselblad XCD 25mm f/2.5 V
- Build Quality and Handling
- Size and Weight
- Sharpness Performance
- Other Optical Quality
- Value
Photography Life Overall Rating
Table of Contents