Bronica Zenzanon PS 150mm f/3.5

Cross-shop this against the Hasselblad 150mm f/4 Sonnar and the optics land in the same neighborhood. Same focal length, same head-and-shoulders reach on a 6x6 frame. What separates them is the badge, the shutter behavior, and the money. The Hasselblad carries the name and the resale value. The Bronica gives you a leaf-shutter short tele on the SQ system, a common 67mm filter thread, and a used price that has never tracked anywhere near the Zeiss. For a lot of people, that last part is the whole argument.

On 6x6 the 150 is the classic portrait length, roughly what an 85 does on 35mm, and it is the lens most SQ shooters reach for first when they put a face in the frame. Wide open at f/3.5 the center holds up well for a portrait, and the falloff toward the corners is gentle enough that it works in your favor on skin rather than against it. Stop down to f/8 and it tightens up nicely across the field. The out-of-focus rendering reads smooth and fairly neutral, no swirl, no busy edges, which is what you want behind a subject. By most accounts contrast sits a touch below the Zeiss, which is not a bad thing on negative film with latitude to spare, and it scans without much of a color cast to correct. Treat all of that as general impression, not lab data, since there is no authoritative per-sample testing on this exact optic.

The PS in the name is worth knowing. These are the later multicoated SQ lenses, a real improvement over the earlier S optics in flare resistance, so backlit and into-the-sun work holds contrast better than the older generation managed.

Every SQ lens hides a Seiko leaf shutter in the barrel, and that is the reason studio shooters bought into this system instead of a focal-plane medium format body. Flash sync runs at every speed up to 1/500. You can drag a strobe against bright daylight, knock down an ambient sky, and shoot fill at noon without the sync ceiling a focal-plane camera forces on you. When you work that way, meter the ambient and the flash as two separate problems. Zone Light Meter will hold your ambient reading while you dial the strobe to taste, and the leaf shutter lets you pick any speed in between without breaking sync.

The catch lives in that same shutter. When a decades-old Seiko unit goes, you are not fixing it with a screwdriver at the kitchen table. The usual failure is sticky slow speeds, where 1/8 and below drag or hang and throw a long exposure off by a stop or more. Buy from a seller who has actually run it across the full speed range, or set aside the cost of a CLA on top of the purchase price.

Where it lands today is squarely on the value side of medium-format short tele. Against the Hasselblad 150 Sonnar and the Mamiya 645 equivalents, the Bronica PS glass usually sits well under half the price of the Zeiss on the used market while closing most of the optical gap at normal print sizes. People paying for the Hasselblad logo will keep paying it. If what you actually want is a leaf-shutter 6x6 portrait lens on a standard 67mm filter, this is the one that leaves money in your pocket for film.