Hasselblad / Zeiss Sonnar CFi 150mm f/4

A lot of square portraits you have seen of someone shot from across a studio, the photographer six or eight feet back so the face does not bulge, came off a 150mm Sonnar on a Hasselblad. It is the short tele every V-system shooter ends up owning, the second lens after the 80mm. On 6x6 it frames roughly like an 80 to 85 on full frame, long enough to flatter a face and compress the background, short enough that you are not shouting across the room to direct.

This is a Carl Zeiss Sonnar, not a Planar, and the design shows in how it draws. The Sonnar layout uses fewer air-to-glass surfaces than a double-Gauss, so it carries contrast well and resists veiling flare better than its element count would suggest. Wide open at f/4 the center is crisp with a faint glow that softens skin without smearing detail, and the falloff into the out-of-focus background is gradual and creamy rather than busy. Stop down to f/5.6 or f/8 and it snaps to full bite across the frame, the kind of acuity fine-grained 120 is made to show off. Bokeh is calm and round, held together by the central leaf diaphragm. No swirl, no nervous edges. The subject sits forward and the background settles down behind it.

The CFi generation ran from 1998 to 2013, the last and best of the V-system glass. It brought improved internal anti-reflection coatings to suppress stray-light flare and a longer-life Prontor leaf shutter, on top of the same Zeiss T* lens coating as the CF. The optics themselves are unchanged from the CF; the improvements are mechanical and in the barrel. That shutter is the reason studio and wedding shooters stayed on these cameras: flash syncs at every speed up to 1/500, with no focal-plane ceiling to fight. You can drag a slow ambient exposure for the room and still freeze your subject under strobe. Meter the ambient base with Zone Light Meter, set the leaf shutter where you want the background, and fire the strobe for the face.

The honest weakness is the leaf shutter itself, and it is mechanical rather than optical. These are old now, and an unserviced copy almost always runs slow at one second and below, which quietly underexposes long exposures and throws off any handheld-meter reading you trusted. Get the speeds checked across the full range before you rely on them. The other catch is mass. The 150mm is a chunk of brass and glass on the front of an already heavy body, and handheld at slower speeds you feel every gram.

Today the 150mm CFi sits in the affordable-tele class of medium-format glass, more than the plentiful 80mm but well under the wides and the long teles. People cross-shop it against the older CF version, which uses the same optics for less money, and against the 110mm f/2 Planar on the focal-plane 200/2000-series bodies (a different camera, not a swap on a 500-series) if they want a faster, shallower look. Most land here because the Sonnar rendering is exactly what a 6x6 head-and-shoulders wants, and because a clean CFi copy holds its value and keeps working.