Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 P Review

Focusing Characteristics

The Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 P autofocuses quietly and very accurately. The autofocus speed feels limited more by the camera than the lens – not the fastest or the best in low light, but acceptable.

I found the accuracy of the XCD 75mm f/3.4 P’s focus to be impeccable even in a lab environment. However, because of the dim maximum aperture of f/3.4, it can have a harder time focusing in very low light compared to one of the company’s f/2.5 lenses (or especially their 80mm f/1.9). This is another reason why a focus distance scale might have been nice, but at least the manual focus ring is smooth to use. Combined with magnifying live view, you shouldn’t have a problem getting sharp photos even when it’s dark out.

As for the close focusing distance, it’s nothing to write home about. The lens focuses down to 55 cm (22 inches), which is the distance between the camera sensor and your subject. This is enough to give you a magnification of 1:5.8 (AKA 0.17× magnification), so it’s viable for some larger flowers, but this is definitely not a macro lens.

Distortion

The XCD 75mm f/3.4 P has a little bit of pincushion distortion in my measurements: 1.47% to be exact. This isn’t enough to worry about most of the time, but if you have a very flat horizon in your photo, or you’re photographing architecture, you’ll probably need to correct it.

Here’s a simulation of 1.47% pincushion distortion:

Vignetting

In uncorrected images, the Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 P has moderate levels of vignetting wide open, and it steadily improves as you stop down. It’s a little worse at infinity focus, but not much. Here’s a full chart of vignetting levels:

While we’ve definitely seen better, this is still very reasonable performance that can be corrected without raising the noise level in the corners too much.

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

There is an exceptionally low amount of lateral chromatic aberration on the XCD 75mm f/3.4 P across the aperture range. Here’s the chart:

Keep in mind that I measured this on Hasselblad’s 100-megapixel sensor, so showing less than one pixel width of lateral CA is extremely impressive. This is the lowest that I’ve measured on any Hasselblad lens so far, even better than the higher-end V series. Nicely done by the XCD 75mm f/3.4 P! You will rarely, if ever, need to correct the lateral chromatic aberration on this lens.

Astute Photography Life readers may have noticed that the graphic design of the chart above is a little different than in most of our reviews. This is a sign that the numbers above can’t reasonably be compared against our full-frame tests on Photography Life. I know it’s tempting, but there aren’t any meaningful conclusions to be drawn between them. (Same with the sharpness tests below.) That’s an unavoidable factor of the different sensor sizes, aspect ratios, and resolutions.

Sharpness

The Hasselblad 75mm f/3.4 P is extremely sharp. Here’s what I measure in the lab:

I was blown away when I saw these numbers. This is just as sharp, if not sharper, than the Hasselblad XCD V lenses that I’ve tested! I also found that there was hardly any focus shift or field curvature to worry about with this lens.

For comparison, here’s how the excellent XCD 55mm f/2.5 V and my favorite 90mm f/2.5 V performed in the same test:

While the maximum central sharpness is reached with the 90mm f/2.5 V at f/4, the maximum midframe and corner performance is actually from the 75mm f/3.4 P! Depending upon what you prioritize, it’s arguably the sharpest lens that I’ve seen from Hasselblad yet. And that means it’s among the sharpest lenses that I’ve ever tested, period.

I should note one small exception. Because of the narrow aspect ratio of our test chart, we can only measure the very farthest corners (the last 1% of the image) when the camera has a 3×2 aspect ratio sensor. Hasselblad’s cameras have a more squarish 3×4 aspect ratio, so the corner numbers in the charts above are more like the last 5% of the image. I did notice that in real-world images, mainly at the wider apertures, there’s a small dip in sharpness in that last 1% of the 75mm f/3.4 P’s corners. So if you’re planning to use this lens for landscape photography and eyeing those amazing numbers at f/5.6, I would actually recommend stopping down to f/8 or f/11 when you want maximum sharpness in the farthest corners (or cropping just a hair).

Bokeh

Bokeh is another word for the qualities of the background blur in a photo. “Good” bokeh is completely subjective, since different photographers have their own preferences for how the background blur looks. That said, photographers commonly want their background blur to be soft, not distracting. Out-of-focus highlights that are round, uniform, and soft-edged are usually considered favorable.

Although the Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 P doesn’t have the brightest maximum aperture around, I found its bokeh to be simply incredible. It’s softer and less distracting than on almost any other lens. Even out-of-focus specular highlights are generally soft-edged.

This bokeh is as good as I’ve seen on any lens – absolutely beautiful background blur to me! If only the lens had a wider maximum aperture so that we could see this blur in more photos…

Flare Performance

The Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 does a pretty good job managing flare when the sun is directly in the frame, although it depends upon your aperture and the exact position of the sun. When the sun is in the corners, we get very good performance through f/16, with just a bit of veiling flare:

Though it’s clearly worse if you stop all the way down to f/32:

And I could go out of my way to get even stronger flare by shooting at f/32 and placing the sun nearer to the center:

Still, this is not a bad performance, and it’s not out of line for a short telephoto / long normal lens.

Unfortunately, I did find one notable problem with this lens’s flare, and that’s when the sun was a little bit out of the frame. You can see a large, diffuse blob of flare in both of the (uncropped) photos below:

I took these two photos while using the lens hood, but it didn’t appear to help. Stopping down (in this case to f/22 and then f/32) exaggerates the issue, but there’s still some veiling flare visible at wider apertures. I wish Hasselblad had gone with a petal-shape or rectangular lens hood on this lens to better block the sun in these cases. The round hood clearly fails when the sun is slightly outside the frame.

Apart from that, the Hasselblad XCD 75mm f/3.4 P has some of the best image quality that I’ve seen in a lens today.

The next page of this review sums up everything and explains the pros and cons of the XCD 75mm f/3.4 P. So, click the menu below to go to “Verdict”: