Hasselblad XPan II

Stand at the rail of a fjord, or the edge of a salt flat, and reach for any normal 35mm camera. You will crop. The XPan does not crop. Flip a lever and the body masks down to 24x65mm, nearly twice the width of a standard frame on a single strip of ordinary 35mm film, and the whole horizon fits without a stitch or a special back. That is the frame this camera exists for, and the reason people put up with everything else it asks of them.

It is a Fuji design wearing a Hasselblad badge, sold in Japan as the Fuji TX-2, and the II is the better-sorted version: a top-plate LCD, a finish that holds up, and the real headline upgrade, timed long shutter speeds running down past four minutes instead of the original's bulb-only long end. You focus with a rangefinder patch, bright and contrasty, and the viewfinder shows that long letterbox window with frame lines for the 45mm normal and the 90mm. The 30mm wide needs its own auxiliary finder in the shoe, because no rangefinder window stretches that far. Build is heavier than it looks, all metal and quiet, and the focal-plane shutter runs from those long timed exposures up to about 1/1000, with flash sync near 1/120.

Underrated, that meter. It is a real center-weighted TTL cell driving aperture-priority auto, and it is honest in even light. The trouble shows up exactly where the camera is most fun: a 24x65mm frame swallows huge swaths of sky, and the meter averages all of it, so a bright top band drags your shadows down into mud. This is where a handheld reading earns its keep. Pull a spot or incident reading off the foreground with Zone Light Meter, place the shadows where you want them, then dial that as exposure compensation or shoot manual. The body's averaging is fine for a flat scene and a liability for a dramatic one, which is most of the scenes you bought this camera to shoot.

It is fully battery dependent. Two CR2 cells run the shutter and meter, and a dead pair means a dead camera, so spares live in the bag next to the film. The other honest weakness is the price of entry. These never got cheap and have only climbed, and a body needing service is its own gamble because parts are scarce and a proper CLA is not casual money. Light seals and the film-advance gearing are the usual worry spots on a hard-used one.

Who shoots it: landscape and travel photographers who want the panoramic look straight out of camera, plus street and documentary shooters who like the long frame for putting a subject inside a wide environment. People cross-shop it against medium-format folders and dedicated pano bodies like the Fuji 617s, but nothing else gives you a rangefinder, a meter, interchangeable lenses, and that frame in a package you can carry all day on a strap. That combination is why a clean one still moves at the prices it does.