Fuji TX-2

Nine minutes on B. Fujifilm raised the bulb limit to 540 seconds when it put the TX-2 on sale in Japan in September 2003 at a list price of 205,000 yen (215,250 yen with tax). That long bulb is the clearest practical gain over the TX-1. Put the body on a tripod, screw a locking cable release into the socket and start a watch, and a harbour or a lit-up rail yard has nine full minutes to build up across a 24x65mm strip of film. The shutter stays open electronically for the whole exposure, and that comes back to bite later.

Most of the other revisions fix handling. The TX-1's ISO dial was easy to turn by accident, so ISO and exposure compensation moved onto the LCD panel, where a stray thumb can't shift them. Shutter speed now shows inside the finder, so you can see what aperture-priority has picked without lowering the camera. Fujifilm also added a 2 second self-timer, up to nine exposures on one frame, selectable rear-curtain flash sync and a rewind setting that leaves the leader out, which helps anyone who wants to reload a part-shot roll or start a reel without a film picker.

Underneath, the camera is the same as the Hasselblad XPan II: a dual-format rangefinder on the XPan lens mount that switches between a standard 24x36 frame and the full panorama partway through a roll. The focal-plane shutter dial runs from 8 seconds to 1/1000 and flash syncs at 1/125. Auto exposure stops at 4 seconds, so anything longer has to be set on the dial or shot on bulb. The body measures 166 x 82 x 51 mm and weighs 745 g before batteries go in. That is a lot of metal for something so slim, and a proper neck strap earns its keep.

Batteries are where it can let you down. The two CR2 cells power the shutter and the motor drive, and when they go flat you have nothing usable left. Because bulb holds the shutter open electronically, a night of nine-minute frames drains them much faster than a day of street work, so pack spares. Fujifilm stopped making the TX-2 in January 2006, and Hasselblad stopped the XPan II the same month. A dead circuit board today means a specialist repair on a body twenty years out of production. Before you pay, get the seller to show you the LCD lighting up, the motor winding and the frame counter advancing.

Used prices swing a lot with condition. With identical internals, the sensible approach is to put the two side by side and buy whichever copy is cleaner, whatever the badge says. The format suits landscapes and night cityscapes, and street shooters use the wide frame to hold two subjects at once without cropping either. You can get the same proportions from a digital crop mode, but a 24x65 negative carries far more film area than any slice of a 35mm frame, and many owners buy the camera for exactly that.

That wide frame is also where exposure gets tricky. A 24x65mm frame takes in bright sky and dark ground at once, and the body's centre-weighted meter blends them together, favouring the middle of the frame. Spot-read both ends with Zone Light Meter, decide where you want the shadows and the sky to fall, then set the exposure yourself in manual or enter the compensation on the LCD.