Hasselblad XPan

Each frame is 65mm wide on ordinary 35mm film. That is the whole XPan story in one number. A single panoramic exposure spans the full height of the film and burns through roughly thirteen perforations at a time, about double a normal frame, so a 36-exposure roll gives you about 21 frames instead of 36, and the meter and viewfinder mask both reconfigure the instant you flip between panoramic and standard 24x36. No darkroom trick, no cropping after the fact. The wide negative is real, exposed edge to edge.

Hold it and the first surprise is the weight. This is a titanium and aluminum rangefinder that feels like it was machined from a billet, dense and cold, heavier than a Leica M and longer in the hand. It was a joint project with Fujifilm, sold in parallel as the Fuji TX-1, and the engineering shows. The rangefinder patch is bright and contrasty, the finder carries projected frame lines that snap wider when you select panoramic, and a parallax-corrected bright line keeps the edges honest. Three lenses ever existed for the mount: a 30mm, a 45mm, and a 90mm. The 45 is the one that lives on the body.

The shutter is electronic, focal plane, running from 8 seconds up to about 1/1000, with flash sync around 1/120. The camera is aperture priority by default. You pick the aperture, a center-weighted cell reads the scene, and the body sets the speed. That center weighting is the catch. Point the XPan at a wide landscape with a bright sky filling the top third of that very long frame and the meter drags the whole exposure down, burying your foreground. This is exactly where a panoramic camera gets you in trouble, because the format begs you to shoot big skies.

Drop a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app onto the land itself, place those shadows on the zone you want, and dial it in with exposure compensation or manual mode instead of trusting the average. Battery dependence is the other honest weakness. Two CR2 cells run everything, the shutter included, so a dead battery is a dead camera with no mechanical fallback, and the film leader sensor can sulk on certain bulk-loaded stock.

People shoot it for one reason. Nothing else gives you that aspect ratio in a body you can hand hold and walk around with, no tripod, no roll-film panoramic monster, no stitching in software afterward. It found a cult among landscape and travel shooters, and prices climbed hard after Hasselblad ended production in the early 2000s, well past what the camera cost new. The XPan and its TX-2 successor now sit in collector territory, cross-shopped against nothing because nothing else does quite this. You buy it for the negative, you tolerate the battery anxiety, and you learn to meter it yourself.