Tele-Tessar 350mm f/4 IF

Zeiss wrote the data sheet for the Tele-Tessar T* 4/350 FE more like an argument than a specification: “The Tele-Tessar T* 4/350 FE lens is probably the most underrated lens in the Hasselblad program. Admittedly, it is big and goes heavy on the shoulder and on the budget.” The defence follows immediately — “it was never cheap or easy for a lens manufacturer to correct aberrations in long focal length lenses considerably faster than f/8 really well. A lot of glass with very special properties and high price is involved” — and ends on the claim that matters, that the correction is high enough for “stunning reproduction of fine detail” with “the maximum resolution at wide open aperture.” The figures behind it: catalogue number 10 45 41, 8 elements in 6 groups, an exact focal length of 349.9 mm, f/4 to f/32, 2000 g, and internal focusing down to 1.9 m — a 1:4 reproduction ratio across a close-limit field of 420 × 420 mm, which as the sheet points out is a face.

The lens has no shutter. It belongs to the shutterless F line Hasselblad introduced with the focal-plane 2000FC in 1977, and it will only make an exposure on a 2000- or 200-series body. When it joined that line is not documented anywhere consulted here. Victor Hasselblad Inc.’s confidential dealer price list effective 1 January 1980 has a section headed “F Lenses w/o Shutter for 2000FC” containing five items — the Distagon 50/2.8 FLE, the Planar 80/2.8, the Planar 110/2, the Sonnar 150/2.8 and Schneider’s Variogon 140–280 — and no 350mm. By the 1985–86 Hasselblad product catalogue it is there, as product number 20486. The introduction therefore falls in that five-year window, and the 1985 date carried here is the first document that shows the lens, not the year it appeared.

Two renamings followed, both electronic rather than optical. The 205TCC of 1991 brought databus communication between lens and body, and the F lenses were reissued as TCC with contacts on the bayonet plate; Karen Nakamura’s page on the 200/2000 series records the TCC lenses being renamed FE in 1994, when the 203FE and 205FCC replaced the 205TCC. The 202FA’s instruction manual, describing the system as it stood in 1998, lists FE lenses “from 50 to 350 mm” and notes that the aperture-ring push button — the EV interlock release inherited from the 2000-series F lenses — “has no function” on the newer bodies. Nothing consulted describes a change to the eight-element optical design across any of these steps.

What the design bought, against the four-element leaf-shutter Tele-Tessar 5.6/350 that ran alongside it, was a full stop of speed, a viewfinder image bright enough for “unusually quick and positive focusing,” and a minimum distance of 1.9 m instead of 4.5 m. What it cost was 650 g and the ability to be used on a 500-series camera at all. Zeiss also made a point of the background: “The tremendous background blur will instantly and easily clean up almost any location,” useful in factories and on cluttered location work, “saving time and labour, thus paying itself off pretty well.”

Production ended with the bodies. Hasselblad Historical’s model table gives 2004 as the year 2000/200-series production ceased, and the FE lenses went with them.

What remains open: an introduction year for the F version from a Hasselblad document rather than an absence-and-presence argument; whether the F, TCC and FE differ optically in any respect; how lens-db’s 1991 date for the FE is meant to be reconciled with the 1994 renaming; any list price; and every production figure, which would have to come from Nordin’s compendia.