Hasselblad / Zeiss Sonnar C 250mm f/5.6

A model lit by strobes, the photographer fifteen feet back, sync set to 1/500th and the ambient getting buried. That is exactly where this lens beats a focal-plane rival. Because the Synchro-Compur leaf shutter lives inside the barrel, flash syncs at every speed it offers. That shutter runs 1 sec to 1/500, plus B and a self-timer, and 1/500 is the genuine top speed, not a stepping stone to something faster. Flash fires clean at all of them. Mount an F lens on a Hasselblad 2000-series body and use the body's focal-plane shutter and your X-sync drops to 1/90, which kills the daylight you were trying to overpower. Worth knowing: the 250 C carries its own leaf shutter, so even on a 2000-series body it keeps the 1/500 sync. The body shutter is the one that costs you.

Optically it is a true Sonnar, the Zeiss lineage that prized contrast and compactness over a dead-flat field. On 6x6 at f/5.6 the center is sharp and the contrast runs high in the classic Zeiss way, deep and a little dense. Stop to f/8 or f/11 and the corners firm up. For the reach you get a long, gentle focus falloff and quiet backgrounds, which is why portrait and product shooters reached for it. It was Hasselblad's standard short tele for studio and portrait work, the length you used when leaf-shutter flash sync mattered and you needed working distance that flatters a face.

The honest weakness is speed and flare. f/5.6 wide open is not much light for a 250mm lens, so available-light work in dim rooms is a fight and the tripod comes out far more than it would on a fast 35mm system. The single-coated chrome C versions also veil and ghost when a bright source sits in or near the frame. Use the dedicated shade. The later T-coated black C and the CF version with the improved coatings tame this a lot, so the chrome glass is the one to flag.

Today the chrome 250 C is one of the cheaper ways into long V-system glass, often a fraction of what a CF or CFi commands. People cross-shop it against the 150 Sonnar, the more popular portrait length, and against the 250 Superachromat, which holds apochromatic color correction far better and costs many multiples more. Buy the plain 250 if you want reach on a budget and you shoot black and white or controlled color. Buy the SA if apochromatic correction on slide film is the whole point.

The leaf shutter hands you a full slow-speed range down to one second built into the lens, so long studio and still-life exposures dial in without fuss. Rack the lens out to its closest focus for tight head shots and the extension robs you of real light, and the prism meters of the era do not always catch it. Let Zone Light Meter compute the bellows factor from the focus extension so your metered f/5.6 holds at the film plane. For filters, the lens uses Hasselblad's Bayonet 50 (B50) mount, so native B50 filters bayonet on directly. Standard threaded ND or grad filters need a B50-to-thread adapter ring.