Hasselblad H2 Review

At The Crossroads
Medium format is at a crossroads. The reason? Digital. Just as the digital juggernaut has swept away all but a mere handful of 35mm film cameras, so too in medium format. By May, 2006, as this is written, we had lost Bronica and Contax. Rollie, sadly, is a non-competitor outside of Europe. Pentax is a shadow of its former self, having withdrawn all of its medium format film products from Europe, and with an as-yet unreleased digital body not due before year's end. Mamiya has sold its photographic division to another company, while its digital ZD camera seems to have only found a home in Europe and Asia, with US availability in doubt.
That leaves Hasselblad. TheH1, first released in late 2002, has now morphed into the H2. I was one of the first journalists to review the H1 four years ago, and was quite shocked at the price – about $6,000 for a camera with 80mm lens. Today, just three years later, Hasselblad has increased in price by nearly $2,000, and that's wi...