Things have been changing at Hasselblad lately. New ownership, new leadership, and bold new product directions with the X1D. Everyone I know in the photography community was blown away when they announced they're extremely compact and elegance mirrorless design. It hadn't even occurred to me that a medium format camera could ever be in this small.
After using it for a few shoot in Vancouver and Palm Springs, The image quality definitely lived up to my expectations. Tons of dynamic range, very low noise, fantastic colour depth, and incredible sharpness. None of that is a surprise coming from Hasselblad, their reputation for quality is well earned. I also love the 3:4 image ratio of the large sensor, I would always prefer it over 4:6.
I was surprised to see quite a bit of vignetting in the 45mm f/3.5 when it’s wide open. It cleans up fine in post, but it was quite a bit for a normal lens.
The physical controls were very well designed. The control dial that pops out is beautiful and practical, and release mechanism on the batteries feels very sturdy and satisfying. One improvement I would love to see is a physical control for the exposure compensation, and there are some software bugs in the touch screen interface, but I’ve heard they may have recently been fixed in a firmware update.
I don’t want to go too much further in depth without spending more time with the Hasselblad X1D, but I loved shooting with it in the time I had. From one perspective it can seem very expensive, but from another, it’s a very reasonable price such an incredible sensor and beautiful design. I hope it’s a sign of more great things to come from Hasselblad.
