Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V Review

Focusing Characteristics

The focusing speed that you achieve with your camera + lens combination is limited by its weakest link. In this case, I suspect that the weak link is the camera, not the lens.

The Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V focuses at an acceptably fast speed. It actually is meaningfully faster than other (non-V) XCD lenses, ranking up there with Hasselblad’s fastest-focusing glass – but that’s still not particularly speedy. A faster-focusing camera would reveal whether the lens can focus more quickly than this, but I suspect it can. On the Hasselblad 907X & 100C or the X2D, it was plenty fast enough for subjects like portraiture or even slow-moving wildlife.

In terms of focus accuracy, the XCD 90mm f/2.5 V is quite excellent even in the most demanding lab environments. I had no complaints about the accuracy for nature photography whatsoever. It’s a similar story for portraiture, although if you aren’t careful, the camera can be a bit of an issue there.

The problem is with the face-detecting autofocus system found on cameras like the X2D. It’s a good system for finding your subject’s face quickly, but it is not eye-detecting. If you don’t take that into account, you may end up focusing on the subject’s eyebrow or eyelashes rather than their iris – something that can show up when you’re shooting with a 100-megapixel sensor, especially if your depth of field is shallow.

The good news is that the manual focusing system works like a charm. The focusing ring is smooth and has a lot of focus throw, while the camera’s effective focus peaking automatically engages when you begin to focus manually.

Distortion

The Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V has hardly any distortion – just -0.11% barrel distortion according to our measurements in the lab. This is so small as to be completely negligible, even if there are straight lines in your photo. Here’s a simulation of -0.11% barrel distortion for reference:

Vignetting

In uncorrected images, the Hasselblad 90mm f/2.5 V has moderate levels of vignetting wide open, with a quick improvement even stopping down just from f/2.5 to f/2.8. Unlike many lenses, vignetting on this lens is actually higher at close-focus distance than infinity. Here’s the full chart:

The most objectionable vignetting here occurs at close focus distance and f/2.5. It’s still not terrible and improves quickly upon stopping down or focusing further away. In general, you’ll be able to correct it in post-processing without any significant issues.

Lateral Chromatic Aberration

There is hardly any lateral chromatic aberration on the Hasselblad 90mm f/2.5 V. 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 only about half a pixel of chromatic aberration is really impressive. These numbers already would have been excellent on our usual 45-megapixel full-frame sensors, but this is another level.

Sharpness

The Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V is an extremely sharp lens. Because it is the first Hasselblad lens that we have tested in the lab at Photography Life, 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 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:

In the center and midframes (generally where your portrait subject might be), the most clinically sharp aperture on this lens is f/4. Even at f/2.5, however, the results are excellent here – just as sharp as they are at f/8, which is often the sweet spot of medium format lenses. As for the corners, they reach their maximum at f/8, but the whole range from f/4 to f/16 has very strong corners.

Since this is our first Hasselblad lens review, to put these results into context, here are some real-world crops to demonstrate how the sharpness changes at different apertures. These images only have Lightroom’s default sharpening applied and are 100% crops from a 100-megapixel sensor. Here’s the original image with a guide to where I cropped:

We’ll start with center crops. Click them to see full-size:

And then corner crops:

These tell the same story as the lab tests. It’s a seriously sharp lens. The best apertures are f/4-5.6 in the center and f/5.6-11 in the corners.

As for other sharpness issues, I measured zero focus shift on this lens – an unusual but welcome sight – and minimal field curvature. It is an extremely well-corrected lens that lives up to Hasselblad’s 100-megapixel sensor.

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.

The Hasselblad 90mm f/2.5 V has beautiful bokeh by typical standards. It has soft edges and minimal texture. As you stop down, it becomes a little less round, but still looks good at wide to moderate apertures like f/4. While there is a bit of a cat’s eye shape at the wider apertures, this has never been something that bothers me in a photo’s background blur – of course, other photographers may differ.

Here are a few sample images and their respective crops:

Bokeh might be subjective, but to my eye, this is a very nice performance. That said, an issue with bokeh on this lens is that the blades of the leaf shutter may introduce patterns to the bokeh when shooting at very fast shutter speeds, approximately 1/1000 and faster, with well-defined specular highlights, as discussed on this thread.

Flare and Backlight

If you’re planning to take backlit photos with this lens, you have nothing to worry about. It is an excellent performer even when the sun is directly in the frame, retaining good contrast and only rarely exhibiting flare. It does a much better job than most short telephoto lenses, as you can see from the sample photos below.

You won’t find many, if any, short telephoto lenses that have such good flare performance. Whatever coatings Hasselblad used on the XCD 90V f/2.5 are extremely impressive.

The next page of this review sums up everything and explains the pros and cons of the Hasselblad XCD 90mm f/2.5 V. So, click the menu below to go to “Verdict”: