Hasselblad H2

Strobes firing at 1/780 in a studio, the modeling lights cut, the background going black no matter how bright the room is. That is the situation the H2 owns and a focal-plane medium-format body simply cannot touch. The leaf shutter sits in the lens, so flash syncs at every speed top to bottom. You can drop the ambient out of a daylight portrait by stopping the shutter up while the strobe holds the subject, and the 35mm pentaprism rivals people cross-shop against it are capped near 1/250 with no answer for that.

It is autofocus medium format, which still sounds like a contradiction to people who learned on a waist-level 500. You hold it like a chunky 35mm SLR turned sideways, eye to a bright prism finder, and the H lenses snap to focus with a confidence that the old V-system never pretended to have. The body talks to the lens electronically, meters through the lens, and runs the leaf shutter from 32 seconds out to about 1/780. Film loads in a removable back, so you swap from a half-shot roll of color to black and white in seconds, and the dark slide keeps the frame protected between bodies.

The H2 was the second turn of the H crank, following the original H1 of 2002. By 2006 Hasselblad and Fujifilm were building these together. The H2 took a 120 film magazine or a digital back bolted to the same rails, and either one worked, which is the whole appeal. Studio shooters who never left film keep it for the glass and the sync, and the price has stayed reasonable precisely because the world chased the digital versions instead.

The honest weakness is the dependence. There is no mechanical fallback speed, no meterless mode, nothing to fire if the cell runs flat. The electronics are generally solid, but a flaky magazine contact or a tired grip battery will end your shoot, and a proper CLA on an H body is not a cheap envelope to mail. You carry spare cells and you keep it serviced, full stop.

For metering, the built-in TTL system is fine for even light, but the leaf shutter is the whole reason you bought this thing, so meter for the flash. Take a daylight-fill reading off the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, set the shutter to balance ambient against your strobe, and the every-speed sync does what no focal-plane body can.

Who keeps one going now: wedding shooters who refuse to give up 6x4.5 film, studio portrait people who want autofocus and leaf-shutter sync in one body, and the odd editorial shooter who likes the negative size without the waist-level dance. Nobody is taking it down a sidewalk for candids. It is a working tool for controlled light, and for that work it earns its keep.