**The Hoselblad 20-35e: A Marvel of Medium Format Zoom Lenses**

Recently, I had the opportunity to get my hands on the Hoselblad 20-35e, a medium format zoom lens that has been making waves in the photography community. As one of the flagship lenses from Hoselblad's E series, this lens is designed to provide the highest optical quality possible, and it certainly delivers.

**Detailed Image Quality at 100 Megapixels**

One of the standout features of the Hoselblad 20-35e is its incredible image quality, which can be fully appreciated with a camera capable of capturing high-resolution images. With a resolution of 100 megapixels, this lens provides an unprecedented level of detail and sharpness, making it ideal for applications where maximum image quality is paramount. Whether you're shooting landscapes, portraits, or still-life compositions, the Hoselblad 20-35e will deliver stunning results that are sure to impress.

**Minimum Focus Distance and Macro Capabilities**

Another notable feature of this lens is its minimum focus distance, which is a relatively short 32 centimeters. This means that you can get up close and personal with your subjects without having to sacrifice image quality or compromise on aperture settings. Additionally, the Hoselblad 20-35e's macro capabilities are truly impressive, allowing you to capture breathtakingly detailed images of small objects and textures. Whether you're shooting product photography, macro still-life, or even extreme close-up portraits, this lens will give you the tools you need to deliver truly exceptional results.

**Wide Aperture and Low Light Performance**

One of the most significant advantages of the Hoselblad 20-35e is its wide aperture of f/3.2, which provides an equivalent focal length of approximately 16mm f/2.5. This makes it extremely easy to capture images in low light conditions, even when using a longer zoom range or higher ISO settings. The lens's ability to handle low light photography and night photography with ease is truly remarkable, making it an ideal choice for astrophotography, event photography, or any other application where available light is limited.

**Ergonomics and Design**

In terms of ergonomics, the Hoselblad 20-35e is a masterclass in design and user experience. The lens feels solid and substantial in the hand, with a focus ring and zoom ring that are both comfortable to use and precisely calibrated for smooth operation. The design itself is also noteworthy, with a timeless aesthetic that evokes the classic medium format cameras of yesteryear. While some might find it heavy or large compared to more modern lenses, we believe that this is a small price to pay for the level of quality and craftsmanship that Hoselblad has brought to bear on this design.

**Where Does the 20-35e Stand in Hoselblad's Lineup?**

So where does the Hoselblad 20-35e fit into Hoselblad's current lineup of lenses? As one of the flagship E-series lenses, it is positioned at the top of the hierarchy, alongside other lenses such as the 38E and 25V. While these lenses are certainly excellent in their own right, we believe that the 20-35e offers something unique and special that sets it apart from its peers.

**Alternatives to the Hoselblad 20-35e**

Of course, not everyone will want or need a lens as comprehensive as the Hoselblad 20-35e. For those on a budget or looking for alternatives, we recommend considering lenses such as the 21mm P-series lens, the 25V lens, or even the 28P prime lens. While these lenses may not offer all of the same features and capabilities as the 20-35e, they are still exceptional tools that can deliver outstanding image quality and value for their price.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the Hoselblad 20-35e is a true marvel of medium format zoom lenses, offering an unparalleled level of optical quality, flexibility, and performance. Whether you're a professional photographer or serious enthusiast, this lens is sure to impress with its stunning image quality, macro capabilities, and low light performance. We can't wait to see what Hoselblad has in store for us next – with a lineup of lenses like this one, the future looks bright indeed!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back everyone in this video I've got a brand new lens from hustel blood that I want to share with you this is the brand new 20- 35e zoom lens so this is now the second zoom lens that hustel blot has made for the xcd system and it is the very first wideangle Zoom oh and the E stands for exclusive so this is a Brand New Concept lineup for hustle blood and hustle blood defined this as signifying High Optical performance delivering edgo Edge high-end image quality hustle blood's E Series holds no bars and will be the flagship lenses in the lineup and the 20 to 35e is the first lens in this series so the next question you're probably wanting to ask is does it deliver oh my all right so how much detail and sharpness are we talking about here let's look at an image this was an image that was taken in New York City this is in the bowy just above Chinatown we are facing East you can see a lot of detail in here but what you probably can't make out are the three people on top of this roof here and if I zoom in you're going to see not only are there three people on top of this roof you can make out the two guys working on top of this roof roof over here this is a lot of detail when we are zoomed in so it's one thing to look at a lens in the center of the image let's check out a corner here if we go down here to this rooftop you can see all the bottles and junk on this table over here uh we can also make out the fake owl that is sitting on top of this satellite here to keep the birds away you can see all the detail in the street this is very sharp and you can tell that it maintains an enormous amount of clarity and sharpness and Fidelity when we go out to the corners of the image so this one is at 20 mm this is a zoom lens and it goes all the way up to 35 let's look at it at 35 if we go to 35 let's check out our people on the rooftop again if we Zoom way in we can see that they are in fact still there and we can get a better idea of these two guys working on the top of this roof over here and even if we look at corner sharpness let's go down to the bottom right hand of this image but you couldn't wouldn't think you could read street signs well if I zoom all the way in I can see very clearly this is four size Street I can read all of the uh signs on the building this is a very sharp lens so we're going to get into over analyzing and pixel peeping some images in just a second but I do want to say that at every focal length across the entire range edgo Edge sharpness this lens is absolutely incredible but first let's talk about the lens itself so the design on this lens is quite interesting it features both internal focusing as well as internal Zoom so you don't see anything move as you're using it it's extremely wellb built much in the style of the newer hustle blood lenses that we've seen over the last 2 years it is a 20 to 35 mm focal length so this is a 16 to 20 8ish equivalent the minimum Focus distance is. 32 M which is very close the lens features 16 elements in 12 groups and there are three aspherical and four extra low dispersion elements the lens features a leaf shutter system allowing flash sync at all shutter speeds all the way up to 1 12,000th of a second one thing that I think is really interesting with the whole concept of this eer is that lens design is always a series of trade-offs so at a certain price point what can you deliver how well can you deliver it and of course the eer being exclusive this is the high-end so this is going to be no holds bar and typically when we think of lens design like that we think of really big lenses and I actually would argue that house blood did a really good job with the ergonomics on this lens yes it is bigger than the primes you would expect that it is a little bit heavier but it's not too cumbersome and I think they've kept this size really good in fact the filter threading on here is actually a 77 mm filter threading so it's not much bigger than what we're seeing on the zoom lenses I think they've done a wonderful job especially with the internal focusing as well as zoom function Fons this is a very wellth thought out lens design so for those keeping score the Lens comes in at a weight of 805 G and of course this lens is compatible with all of the xcd cameras so this is the x2d as well as the original x1d the x1d Mark II as well as the 907x cameras with both the 50 megapix and 100 megapixel backs at its widest setting it's just a few degrees wider than the 21 mm Prime that was in the original lineup for this camera so technically this is the widest lens in Hustle blood's lineup and of course when looking at resolution and sharpness rendering this lens is really essential to landscape and Architectural photography the image quality is absolutely outstanding all right so I want to look at some image samples so we can point a few things out that are really impressive about the design on this lens so first of all with a Ultra wide angle like this it's really good at photographing tight architectural spaces so this is a hotel room that I had in New York City a little while back and uh this was just shot the bed takes up the entire width of the room here but the first thing that I want to point point out on here is how well this lens handles Distortion so typically this is something that's very difficult when you design with wider angle lenses this image was taken at 20 mm so this is the widest focal length on the lens and you can see that the lines are pretty straight and I'm pointing this out because a lot of times when I get lenses for previewing um this is before their release so there are no lens adjustments in Lightroom there's no lens profiles that you can select to correct certain things so vignetting and Distortion typically are left uncorrected now having said that the reason I'm pointing this out is that a lot of manufacturers now rely on post-processing software to correct things like Distortion some companies absolutely get away with murder on this but you can see all the lines are straight here there is a little bit of distortion that could be corrected but this is really close and why is this important because this is going to maintain sharpness and image Fidelity if you're not having to bend the image to correct image distortion on here so that's one thing I'm very impressed with and that speaks volumes to how good the lens designers at hustle blood are and of course you never get sick of this with 100 megapixel lens I can zoom all the way out and it's sharp clear to the distance here and we can see every detail in the landscape and go back in you can see how small that is so there is an enormous amount of resolution that you get out of these cameras and it's really fun to uh be able to do this as a party trick but uh anyway uh the image quality is fantastic back to the design on this lens this is really impressive because with a medium format sensor it's bigger than 35 mm so you would expect with having to have more coverage the lens would be much bigger than what you would find on 35mm and it's really not it's very Compact and it fits right in the range couple more images I want to share with you this is one of my favorite images that I took on here and I think environmental portraits are a really cool possibility with wide-angle lenses this was taken at the Modern which is the Contemporary Art Museum here in Fort Worth this is the dosent waiting for the door to open early in the morning now I did crop this image to tighten it up a little bit but still if we zoom in you can see that we still maintain an enormous amount of image quality kind of makes me wonder if we're not being Forward Thinking with this lens designed to support higher megapixel counts one day remains to be seen but uh it is very sharp which brings me to another point that I want to make about medium format and cropping so when we think back to the film days 35mm being the standard it was very difficult to crop because you could only enlarge that small negative space so much before you would start losing image quality and the grain would become too big and so that's where medium format came in and hustle blood obviously comes from that tradition when you got into magazine publishing it also gave the art director a little bit of freedom in terms of maybe we wanted to crop something out or we wanted move things around and I think that it's a little bit different now but it's still the same concept and when we consider hos blot in the idea of medium format especially with 100 megapixels and as I was showing you earlier with that image with the window out of the hotel room if this is my image here and obviously I took this just for display here that took this down a rather long hallway uh we have a lot of information I probably would want to crop and most people would think with you know lower megapixel count this would be a little too extreme but if I zoom in uh you can see that we still maintain a lot of detail and a lot of Fidelity in here I'll show you another image many of you know my friend Hugh who joined me that day and if I zoom in on Hugh he's got uh really awesome hair which is very detailed at 100 megapixels now I also want to mention minimum Focus distance so it is rather close with this lens it is 32 cm and as you can see in a shot like this I can zoom in and you can almost crop into macro like detail on here which is crazy with an ultra wide angle like this uh you can also see when I zoom back out that does give you some bokeh in here which is actually really nice I don't think the are really the strengths of the intended use on this lens but something that is worth mentioning with an aperture of f 3.2 this is a very wide apperture especially for medium format this gives you an equivalent roughly to a 16 mm f2.5 which is very unusual for a zoom lens this makes low light photography and night photography very easy especially when you're using let's say the x2d which has inbody image stabilization enables a lot of things that you can do without using a tripod so we've seen the image quality let's talk a little bit about ergonomics the 20 to 35e is very solid feeling as I mentioned earlier there are a lot of glass elements in here that does contribute to the weight I don't think it's too heavy though I think it is designed with a lot of intention towards ergonomics nothing feels plasticky it's very solid very minimal it has a very Timeless design you do get the name plate branding with the old school logo as we saw with the V lenses and it's also got the H logo as the grip pattern for both the focus and zoom Rings it's actually very interesting when hosel blad mentioned they were going to send me this lens and what it was I expect it to be a lot bigger and a lot heavier if you're used to Old School medium format that's the kind of the way that it was for a long time I think that the designers have taken advantage of all of the advances that we have in lens's design right now and they've designed something that is very ergonomic very comfortable and has the highest quality that you would expect out of something like this it is really impressive all right so where does the 20 to 35e stand in the current hustle blood lineup all right so this is the first of the eer lenses E standing for exclusive it is the flagship the top of the line the CRM to the CRM it is highest Optical quality possible it also comes in at a very high price when you consider actually that you're replacing several prime lenses with one zoom lens and that quality maintains itself throughout the focal range I don't think the price seems as high as it would initially now having said that you could use those Prime choices as Alternatives so we've got the P series of lenses P standing for portable we also have the V series of lenses v stands for versatile and then we also have the original lenses that hustle blot initially launched with the x1d and the X1 Mark 2 one lens that comes to mind is the older 21 mm and I want to clarify something on here because every time I bring up that lens I talk about how far we've come in terms of image quality and a lot of people say you doesn't like that lens that is not true I do like that lens that lens is outstanding I just think that we've come along way the 21 mm is really cool this actually gives you just a hair wider field of view than the 21 not much it goes down to 20 but that would be an alternative for something like this I think another alternative might be the 25v or even the 38v both of those are the versatile lens lineup they're extraordinarly good they come in at a much lower price point and you can't go wrong with either one of those and finally another alternative is the 28p the 28p is really cool because of the size it is an F4 but it is a prime lens so it is designed with a very small footprint and it's a great lens in fact I will say I have experience with all of the lenses in hos Bloods lineup and there really aren't any bad lenses you can't go wrong with any of these they are all quite good and as somebody who owned and still owns the original x1d it's been really interesting to see how this system has evolved Through The Years through all the lenses through all the changes that they've done and we're at a point right now where hos blood has a very mature lineup especially on the wide end of things and there are a lot of choices and it makes me really excited to think about what hos blood might have on the design table for future lenses so I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below I will see you guys in the next video Until then laterwelcome back everyone in this video I've got a brand new lens from hustel blood that I want to share with you this is the brand new 20- 35e zoom lens so this is now the second zoom lens that hustel blot has made for the xcd system and it is the very first wideangle Zoom oh and the E stands for exclusive so this is a Brand New Concept lineup for hustle blood and hustle blood defined this as signifying High Optical performance delivering edgo Edge high-end image quality hustle blood's E Series holds no bars and will be the flagship lenses in the lineup and the 20 to 35e is the first lens in this series so the next question you're probably wanting to ask is does it deliver oh my all right so how much detail and sharpness are we talking about here let's look at an image this was an image that was taken in New York City this is in the bowy just above Chinatown we are facing East you can see a lot of detail in here but what you probably can't make out are the three people on top of this roof here and if I zoom in you're going to see not only are there three people on top of this roof you can make out the two guys working on top of this roof roof over here this is a lot of detail when we are zoomed in so it's one thing to look at a lens in the center of the image let's check out a corner here if we go down here to this rooftop you can see all the bottles and junk on this table over here uh we can also make out the fake owl that is sitting on top of this satellite here to keep the birds away you can see all the detail in the street this is very sharp and you can tell that it maintains an enormous amount of clarity and sharpness and Fidelity when we go out to the corners of the image so this one is at 20 mm this is a zoom lens and it goes all the way up to 35 let's look at it at 35 if we go to 35 let's check out our people on the rooftop again if we Zoom way in we can see that they are in fact still there and we can get a better idea of these two guys working on the top of this roof over here and even if we look at corner sharpness let's go down to the bottom right hand of this image but you couldn't wouldn't think you could read street signs well if I zoom all the way in I can see very clearly this is four size Street I can read all of the uh signs on the building this is a very sharp lens so we're going to get into over analyzing and pixel peeping some images in just a second but I do want to say that at every focal length across the entire range edgo Edge sharpness this lens is absolutely incredible but first let's talk about the lens itself so the design on this lens is quite interesting it features both internal focusing as well as internal Zoom so you don't see anything move as you're using it it's extremely wellb built much in the style of the newer hustle blood lenses that we've seen over the last 2 years it is a 20 to 35 mm focal length so this is a 16 to 20 8ish equivalent the minimum Focus distance is. 32 M which is very close the lens features 16 elements in 12 groups and there are three aspherical and four extra low dispersion elements the lens features a leaf shutter system allowing flash sync at all shutter speeds all the way up to 1 12,000th of a second one thing that I think is really interesting with the whole concept of this eer is that lens design is always a series of trade-offs so at a certain price point what can you deliver how well can you deliver it and of course the eer being exclusive this is the high-end so this is going to be no holds bar and typically when we think of lens design like that we think of really big lenses and I actually would argue that house blood did a really good job with the ergonomics on this lens yes it is bigger than the primes you would expect that it is a little bit heavier but it's not too cumbersome and I think they've kept this size really good in fact the filter threading on here is actually a 77 mm filter threading so it's not much bigger than what we're seeing on the zoom lenses I think they've done a wonderful job especially with the internal focusing as well as zoom function Fons this is a very wellth thought out lens design so for those keeping score the Lens comes in at a weight of 805 G and of course this lens is compatible with all of the xcd cameras so this is the x2d as well as the original x1d the x1d Mark II as well as the 907x cameras with both the 50 megapix and 100 megapixel backs at its widest setting it's just a few degrees wider than the 21 mm Prime that was in the original lineup for this camera so technically this is the widest lens in Hustle blood's lineup and of course when looking at resolution and sharpness rendering this lens is really essential to landscape and Architectural photography the image quality is absolutely outstanding all right so I want to look at some image samples so we can point a few things out that are really impressive about the design on this lens so first of all with a Ultra wide angle like this it's really good at photographing tight architectural spaces so this is a hotel room that I had in New York City a little while back and uh this was just shot the bed takes up the entire width of the room here but the first thing that I want to point point out on here is how well this lens handles Distortion so typically this is something that's very difficult when you design with wider angle lenses this image was taken at 20 mm so this is the widest focal length on the lens and you can see that the lines are pretty straight and I'm pointing this out because a lot of times when I get lenses for previewing um this is before their release so there are no lens adjustments in Lightroom there's no lens profiles that you can select to correct certain things so vignetting and Distortion typically are left uncorrected now having said that the reason I'm pointing this out is that a lot of manufacturers now rely on post-processing software to correct things like Distortion some companies absolutely get away with murder on this but you can see all the lines are straight here there is a little bit of distortion that could be corrected but this is really close and why is this important because this is going to maintain sharpness and image Fidelity if you're not having to bend the image to correct image distortion on here so that's one thing I'm very impressed with and that speaks volumes to how good the lens designers at hustle blood are and of course you never get sick of this with 100 megapixel lens I can zoom all the way out and it's sharp clear to the distance here and we can see every detail in the landscape and go back in you can see how small that is so there is an enormous amount of resolution that you get out of these cameras and it's really fun to uh be able to do this as a party trick but uh anyway uh the image quality is fantastic back to the design on this lens this is really impressive because with a medium format sensor it's bigger than 35 mm so you would expect with having to have more coverage the lens would be much bigger than what you would find on 35mm and it's really not it's very Compact and it fits right in the range couple more images I want to share with you this is one of my favorite images that I took on here and I think environmental portraits are a really cool possibility with wide-angle lenses this was taken at the Modern which is the Contemporary Art Museum here in Fort Worth this is the dosent waiting for the door to open early in the morning now I did crop this image to tighten it up a little bit but still if we zoom in you can see that we still maintain an enormous amount of image quality kind of makes me wonder if we're not being Forward Thinking with this lens designed to support higher megapixel counts one day remains to be seen but uh it is very sharp which brings me to another point that I want to make about medium format and cropping so when we think back to the film days 35mm being the standard it was very difficult to crop because you could only enlarge that small negative space so much before you would start losing image quality and the grain would become too big and so that's where medium format came in and hustle blood obviously comes from that tradition when you got into magazine publishing it also gave the art director a little bit of freedom in terms of maybe we wanted to crop something out or we wanted move things around and I think that it's a little bit different now but it's still the same concept and when we consider hos blot in the idea of medium format especially with 100 megapixels and as I was showing you earlier with that image with the window out of the hotel room if this is my image here and obviously I took this just for display here that took this down a rather long hallway uh we have a lot of information I probably would want to crop and most people would think with you know lower megapixel count this would be a little too extreme but if I zoom in uh you can see that we still maintain a lot of detail and a lot of Fidelity in here I'll show you another image many of you know my friend Hugh who joined me that day and if I zoom in on Hugh he's got uh really awesome hair which is very detailed at 100 megapixels now I also want to mention minimum Focus distance so it is rather close with this lens it is 32 cm and as you can see in a shot like this I can zoom in and you can almost crop into macro like detail on here which is crazy with an ultra wide angle like this uh you can also see when I zoom back out that does give you some bokeh in here which is actually really nice I don't think the are really the strengths of the intended use on this lens but something that is worth mentioning with an aperture of f 3.2 this is a very wide apperture especially for medium format this gives you an equivalent roughly to a 16 mm f2.5 which is very unusual for a zoom lens this makes low light photography and night photography very easy especially when you're using let's say the x2d which has inbody image stabilization enables a lot of things that you can do without using a tripod so we've seen the image quality let's talk a little bit about ergonomics the 20 to 35e is very solid feeling as I mentioned earlier there are a lot of glass elements in here that does contribute to the weight I don't think it's too heavy though I think it is designed with a lot of intention towards ergonomics nothing feels plasticky it's very solid very minimal it has a very Timeless design you do get the name plate branding with the old school logo as we saw with the V lenses and it's also got the H logo as the grip pattern for both the focus and zoom Rings it's actually very interesting when hosel blad mentioned they were going to send me this lens and what it was I expect it to be a lot bigger and a lot heavier if you're used to Old School medium format that's the kind of the way that it was for a long time I think that the designers have taken advantage of all of the advances that we have in lens's design right now and they've designed something that is very ergonomic very comfortable and has the highest quality that you would expect out of something like this it is really impressive all right so where does the 20 to 35e stand in the current hustle blood lineup all right so this is the first of the eer lenses E standing for exclusive it is the flagship the top of the line the CRM to the CRM it is highest Optical quality possible it also comes in at a very high price when you consider actually that you're replacing several prime lenses with one zoom lens and that quality maintains itself throughout the focal range I don't think the price seems as high as it would initially now having said that you could use those Prime choices as Alternatives so we've got the P series of lenses P standing for portable we also have the V series of lenses v stands for versatile and then we also have the original lenses that hustle blot initially launched with the x1d and the X1 Mark 2 one lens that comes to mind is the older 21 mm and I want to clarify something on here because every time I bring up that lens I talk about how far we've come in terms of image quality and a lot of people say you doesn't like that lens that is not true I do like that lens that lens is outstanding I just think that we've come along way the 21 mm is really cool this actually gives you just a hair wider field of view than the 21 not much it goes down to 20 but that would be an alternative for something like this I think another alternative might be the 25v or even the 38v both of those are the versatile lens lineup they're extraordinarly good they come in at a much lower price point and you can't go wrong with either one of those and finally another alternative is the 28p the 28p is really cool because of the size it is an F4 but it is a prime lens so it is designed with a very small footprint and it's a great lens in fact I will say I have experience with all of the lenses in hos Bloods lineup and there really aren't any bad lenses you can't go wrong with any of these they are all quite good and as somebody who owned and still owns the original x1d it's been really interesting to see how this system has evolved Through The Years through all the lenses through all the changes that they've done and we're at a point right now where hos blood has a very mature lineup especially on the wide end of things and there are a lot of choices and it makes me really excited to think about what hos blood might have on the design table for future lenses so I would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below I will see you guys in the next video Until then later\n"