Hasselblad FE Zoom 60-120mm f/4.8

Hasselblad announced this zoom in June 1998, near the end of the V system’s life, and it is the only one the company made for its own focal-plane bodies — the Schneider Variogon of the 1970s had been a leaf-shutter lens for the 500 series, and this is a different thing entirely.

Being an FE lens, it carries no shutter. Exposure is timed by the body’s focal-plane blind, which restricts it to the 200 and 2000 series and rules out every 500-series camera; in exchange it carries the databus contacts that let a 203FE or a 205FCC meter through it. The range is a straight 2× — Hasselblad’s page gives the true focal lengths as 61.3mm to 117.7mm — at a constant f/4.8, covering 66° down to 36° across the diagonal. It focuses to 1.2m, weighs 1,520g, and takes Series 93 bayonet filters, the largest fitting in the system.

Two things about it are unresolved. Hasselblad’s specification reads “13 multicoated elements, 13 groups,” and thirteen air-spaced singlets would be an unusual construction for a zoom of this kind; the count may be a misprint for a smaller number of groups, and nothing published settles it. And the company never named the optical maker. Dealer copy describes the lens as designed by Hasselblad and produced in Japan, which points at Fuji, but no source consulted confirms it — and the attribution to Schneider that circulates in some listings appears to be confusion with the Variogon.

It was gone from the catalogue by about 2001. Japanese Wikipedia’s model list agrees with Hasselblad’s figures, and beyond those two documents there is little written about it at all.