Tessar 16.5cm f/4.5 (MK 80)

The standard lens of the MK 80 m/43, the land camera Ross built for the Swedish army — a different animal from the aerial cameras, working on a tripod at ground level in a 7×12cm format that Hasselblad Historical describes as moderately panoramic, and which several other accounts get wrong as 7×15.

Ross Aktiebolag of Göteborg was the company Victor Hasselblad ran through the war, building aerial cameras for the Swedish air force, and it is where the firm that later made the 1600F learned its trade. Ross built the bodies and, unusually, the shutters; it made no glass at all. The lenses came from Germany — Zeiss, Schneider and Hugo Meyer — and Hasselblad Historical notes that no documentation has been found describing how they were imported into a neutral country that badly needed optics and rather more badly needed to be left alone.

The camera weighs 5.7kg with this lens and its magazine attached, and 17.3kg in its wooden case with accessories. Film advance and shutter cocking are done together, by rotating the entire right-hand grip about 120 degrees.

Nothing Ross fitted was anti-reflection coated; coating reached Swedish military optics after the war, and these lenses date from before it.

One habit of the Ross shop matters to anyone who finds one of these lenses loose. The mounts were hand-tuned to fit a particular camera, and the protective barrel was then engraved with that camera’s serial number. A lens from one body will not necessarily seat correctly on another of the same model, which is why these are worth far more still attached to the camera they were fitted to than separated from it. The point is made explicitly on this camera: Hasselblad Historical notes that although the MK 80 and HK 7 lens mounts share an overall design, not all MK 80 lenses will fit all HK 7 cameras or the reverse, precisely because each mount was tuned by hand and then engraved with its camera’s number.

Hasselblad Historical’s account of the Ross cameras is the only substantial source on them, and its author marks several specifications as information requested — an open call to readers for detail he does not have. Maximum aperture, weight, element count and production quantities for this lens are among the figures that no published source gives, so what is recorded here is deliberately short.