Fujifilm TX-2
Fujifilm TX‑2: the panoramic rangefinder that quietly broke the rules
The Fujifilm TX‑2 is one of those cameras that, once you've spent any time with it, you slightly resent owning. Pick it up cold and it feels like a perfectly normal 35mm rangefinder – about the size of a Leica M6, perhaps a bit deeper, with a real rangefinder finder, bayonet‑mount interchangeable lenses, an aperture‑priority exposure system and a film advance lever. Then you load a roll of 35mm into the back and start shooting in its native panoramic mode, and the rest of your camera collection suddenly seems to be making pictures of the wrong shape. The TX‑2 puts a 65×24mm panoramic frame on ordinary 35mm film – a frame two and a half times as wide as it is tall, half as wide again as a "normal" 36×24mm 35mm negative – and produces images with a sense of scale that nothing else short of an actual medium‑format panoramic camera can match. The catch, of course, is that you only get about twenty frames per 36‑exposure roll, and that every other camera you own thereafter looks slightly too square. (Travis Estell)
This particular example is the Japanese‑market black‑painted version of the camera that elsewhere in the world was sold by Hasselblad as the XPan II. Same camera, same factory, same engineers, slightly different badge work and slightly different finish. The TX‑2 in the photographs here is wearing the 45mm f/4 Super‑EBC Fujinon – the standard lens of the system, equivalent in field of view to roughly a 25mm on full‑frame 35mm when used in panoramic mode – and the camera's lovely habit of carrying the dual‑format selector right there on the back panel means you can switch between standard and panoramic mid‑roll, frame by frame. The frame counter quietly adjusts itself to tell you how many shots you have left, in whichever format you're currently shooting. It is one of the more genuinely clever ideas in any film camera ever made.
A short Swedish‑Japanese history
The TX‑2 was the second of a small family of cameras developed jointly between Hasselblad in Sweden and Fujifilm in Japan, and it has a slightly unusual provenance for that reason. Hasselblad, at the end of the 1990s, was a company built around medium‑format SLRs and looking for a new 35mm project. Fujifilm, on the other side of the world, had been quietly making the GA645 and GW690 medium‑format rangefinders and had the optical and mechanical know‑how to build a small rangefinder body with serious lenses on the front. The two companies agreed to collaborate: Hasselblad would handle the brand and the European market; Fujifilm would do the engineering and manufacturing in Japan. (Shoot It With Film)
The first camera in the line, launched in 1998, was branded as the Hasselblad XPan everywhere except Japan, where it was sold by Fujifilm as the TX‑1. The two cameras were mechanically and optically identical except for the lettering on the front and a slightly different colour for the titanium body shell. A small range of dedicated lenses arrived alongside it – initially the 45mm f/4 standard, then the 90mm f/4 short telephoto, and finally, in 1999, the spectacular 30mm f/5.6 super‑wide that needed its own centre filter and its own external optical finder.
The TX‑2, released in 2003, was the same camera with five years of user feedback ploughed back in. None of the changes were structural – the body, the lens mount, the rangefinder system, the shutter and the panoramic film transport were all carried over from the TX‑1 – but each was the result of someone actually using the original camera in the field. The ISO dial, which on the TX‑1 lived on top of the camera and was famously easy to knock off accidentally, was moved into the rear LCD panel along with exposure compensation. The viewfinder LCD readout was brightened and given more information. The bulb exposure limit was extended from a couple of minutes to nine, for the small but vocal community shooting star trails. A two‑to‑ten second self‑timer was added (the TX‑1 had only a fixed timer), the film leader could now be set to stay out of the cassette after rewind, and the flash sync was made selectable between first and second curtain. The cumulative effect is the camera the TX‑1 should have been from the start. (Camera Geekery)
Production of both the TX‑2 and the Hasselblad XPan II ran from 2003 to 2006, by which point Hasselblad had decided that the world was going digital and quietly retired the panoramic line. Their next collaboration would be with Sony – the much‑mocked Lunar, a rebadged NEX‑7 with a wooden grip – which is the kind of corporate decision that, in retrospect, looks like it was made by someone who had stopped paying attention. Roughly 9,000 TX‑2 and XPan II bodies are thought to have been made between them, of which a fair number are still in working order, and their secondhand value has done the usual orphaned‑film‑camera thing of climbing steadily over the last decade until a clean TX‑2 with a 45mm now goes for roughly the same money as the average secondhand car. (YouTube: I Finally Got My Hands on the Legendary XPan II)
The trick: how it actually puts a 65mm‑wide frame on 35mm film
The single most interesting thing about the TX‑2 is the bit that you can't see when the camera is closed up. Open the back, as in the photograph above, and the secret is suddenly very obvious indeed.
A standard 35mm frame is 36mm wide by 24mm tall, with the long edge running across the roll of film as it passes from cassette to take‑up spool. The TX‑2's panoramic frame is the same 24mm tall – which is, after all, the height of the film between the perforations – but extends to 65mm wide, almost twice as long. To make that work, the camera body simply has a longer film gate, with a moveable internal mask that swings out of the way for panoramic mode and slides back into place for 24×36 mode. The lens projects an image circle large enough to cover the full 65×24mm panoramic frame; in 24×36 mode the central rectangle of that image circle is what reaches the film, with the rest of the image circle landing harmlessly on the mask.
This is not, strictly speaking, a new idea – stretched‑film panoramic cameras existed long before the XPan, going back to the Cirkut panoramas of the early 20th century and the Soviet Horizont and Hasselblad‑less‑relevant Linhof Technorama of the 1970s – but it is the first time anyone successfully integrated dual‑format shooting into a 35mm rangefinder body with interchangeable lenses. The film transport had to be substantially redesigned to advance the film by the right amount for each format (it advances 8 perforations per frame in 24×36 mode and 13 in panoramic mode), the frame counter had to keep track of which format each frame was, and the lenses themselves had to be designed with an image circle nearly half as large again as a normal 35mm lens needs. The result is a camera that is, in panoramic mode, doing something with a 35mm roll that you would normally need a 6×9 medium‑format body to do. (Jonas Rask)
A practical consequence worth knowing: because the panoramic frame uses more film per shot, a 36‑exposure roll yields 20 panoramic frames, or 36 standard frames, or any mixture in between. The TX‑2 keeps a running count of remaining frames in whichever mode you've selected and will warn you when you're about to roll off the end of the roll. If you change format mid‑roll the counter is updated, frame by frame, on the rear LCD. This is one of those small features that sounds trivial on paper and turns out, in use, to be the entire reason the camera works as well as it does.
The body: titanium, magnesium, and very considered ergonomics
Pick a TX‑2 up cold and the first thing that hits you is how completely conventional it feels. This is not, as some panoramic cameras are, an awkward elongated brick with controls in unexpected places; it is a perfectly normal‑shaped rangefinder body that just happens to be making twice‑as‑wide pictures. The top plate is titanium (painted black on this Japanese‑market example, left silver titanium on the corresponding XPan II), the body shell is a magnesium alloy casting, and the grip on the right‑hand side is a textured rubber‑over‑metal compound that warms quickly in the hand. Weight is around 815g for the body with battery and lens cap, rising to about 1.1kg with the 45mm fitted. (YouTube: Fujifilm TX‑1 and Hasselblad XPan)
Reading from left to right across the top plate of this camera:
The hot shoe sits centrally on the top plate, with the FUJIFILM Professional badge to its left.
Next to the hot shoe, to its left, the P showing on the normal/panoramic switching lever.
The shutter‑speed dial (with positions for B and 8 seconds through 1/1000s in single stops, plus an A position for aperture‑priority autoexposure), and a silver central locking button.
The chrome shutter release button in the centre, there is no threaded centre for a cable release; instead, that lives on the left hand side of the camera, just above the strap lug.
A small LCD panel for the frame counter, just behind the shutter release.
The power switch with a silver central lock, with positions for OFF, S (single shot), C (continuous, around 3 fps) and a self‑timer position.
The back of the camera is where the TX‑2 differentiates itself most obviously from its TX‑1 predecessor, and where most of the 2003 refinements live. The rear face is dominated by a large, slightly recessed LCD panel that shows ISO, exposure compensation, frame count and current format (P for panoramic, "24" for standard). Three buttons live beneath it: a small illumination button marked with the sun symbol, the recessed film rewind button, and a MODE button that cycles between format and the various status displays. Two arrow buttons on the right of the LCD do the actual setting. There is no menu system in any meaningful sense – this is a film camera, not a digital one – but the configurability is genuinely more useful than it looks.
The rangefinder eyepiece sits on the left of the back panel, with a diopter‑adjustment lever directly underneath it. The eyepiece itself is bright, clear, and frames automatically for whichever format and focal length you have mounted: in panoramic mode the bright‑line frame is a wide horizontal rectangle that fills most of the finder; in 24×36 mode the frame contracts to a more conventional shape in the centre of the finder, with the unused area outside the frame visibly darkened. As you change lenses, the frame lines change to match – 30mm, 45mm or 90mm, with parallax correction at all focusing distances. An LED readout along the bottom of the finder shows shutter speed (slightly improved on the TX‑2 over the TX‑1, which only displayed exposure compensation status), and a small + or – flag indicates which way to nudge exposure compensation if you've gone outside the meter's working range.
The metering itself is centre‑weighted TTL, reading through the lens via a silicon photo cell behind the mirror, with a working range of EV 0 to EV 19 at ISO 100. In aperture‑priority mode the camera selects shutter speed from B through 1/1000s in stepless increments. In manual mode you set the shutter dial to one of the marked positions and the meter just suggests an aperture in the finder. Bulb exposures run up to nine minutes – up from two on the TX‑1 – which is enough for most star trail work without needing an external intervalometer.
The lens: 45mm f/4 Super‑EBC Fujinon
The lens on the front of this camera is the system's standard lens, a 45mm f/4 Super‑EBC Fujinon, and it is the lens most people who buy into the TX system end up shooting with most of the time. It is a six‑element design with Super‑EBC multilayer coating (Fujifilm's house equivalent of Zeiss's T* coating, designed for the unusually wide angles of incidence that this lens has to deal with at the edges of the panoramic frame), a 49mm filter thread, close focus of 0.7m, and a maximum aperture of f/4. The lens is bayonet‑mounted to the body via a proprietary Fuji TX/Hasselblad XPan mount, with mechanical coupling for full‑aperture metering and an automatic diaphragm.
The interesting bit, optically, is what "45mm" means in the context of this camera. On a standard 36×24mm 35mm frame, a 45mm lens behaves like a slightly long normal lens – a hair wider than a 50mm. On the TX‑2's 65×24mm panoramic frame, the diagonal of the negative is around 70mm, and a 45mm lens behaves like a moderate wide angle – roughly the equivalent of a 25mm on full‑frame in panoramic mode, or a 28mm if you think in terms of horizontal angle of view. The lens is, in effect, doing two jobs at once: it's a normal lens for the standard frame and a wide angle for the panoramic frame, and it's been designed and corrected with both in mind.
The two other lenses in the system extend the range either side. The 90mm f/4 Fujinon is the system's short telephoto, behaving like a slightly long normal in panoramic mode (around 50mm equivalent) and a proper portrait lens in standard mode (around 90mm); it's the rarest of the three lenses and the one that tends to live boxed in collectors' cupboards. At the other end is the 30mm f/5.6 Aspherical Fujinon, a genuinely extreme super‑wide that covers about a 94° horizontal angle on the panoramic frame – the equivalent of about a 17mm on full‑frame, in panoramic terms – and which requires both a graduated centre filter (to even out the cos⁴ light falloff that any really wide lens inevitably produces) and an accessory optical viewfinder (because the main finder simply can't show a field of view that wide). The 30mm is the lens that, when fitted, makes the TX‑2 look almost ridiculous, and is also the lens that produces the system's most spectacular images.
A small note on the 45mm aperture. f/4 is, in modern terms, not a particularly fast lens; in low light you find yourself reaching for ISO 800 film much sooner than you would with an f/2 normal. The trade‑off is that wide open at f/4 the lens is essentially perfect – sharp to the corners of the panoramic frame, very low distortion, only a small amount of vignetting which itself is reduced by f/5.6. The lens was designed for a generation of slow, fine‑grained transparency films (Velvia 50, Provia 100F) and on those it produces images of almost frightening resolution. On modern fast black‑and‑white film, like the Kodak Tri‑X 400 the Tankerton image below was shot on, it has more headroom than it can possibly use.
The Tankerton frame: what panoramic actually does to a seascape
The black‑and‑white frame above – Tankerton beach on the North Kent coast, July 2008, looking out across the Thames Estuary towards the Maunsell sea forts on the horizon – is the kind of picture the TX‑2 was made for, and shows in a single frame why this camera was worth the considerable effort to design.
The composition is essentially a horizontal sandwich: a strip of shingle and seaweed across the bottom of the frame, a wedge of wooden groyne marching out into the surf on the right, a band of choppy estuary in the middle, and above it all an enormous sky with a curtain of rain dropping diagonally from a dark cloud bank on the right‑hand side. On a standard 36×24 negative, this scene would either be a tight horizontal that crops out the foreground or a square crop that loses most of the sky; the TX‑2's 65×24 frame fits all of it in at once, and the eye reads across the picture in the way you actually saw the scene with both eyes open. That is the panoramic format's quiet trick. It is not a wider angle of view than a 35mm camera can manage with a wide enough lens; it is the same angle of view, with the top and bottom of the frame cropped off so that the picture is shaped like human peripheral vision rather than like a postcard.
The Maunsell forts on the horizon – the Red Sands and Shivering Sands towers built in 1943 as anti‑aircraft platforms in the Thames Estuary – are visible as faint silhouettes against the rain curtain, which is the kind of detail that wouldn't survive on a smaller negative and which the TX‑2's 65mm‑wide frame holds easily. Tri‑X at ISO 400, almost certainly developed in HC‑110 or D‑76 going by the tonal range, gives the cloud bank its weight and the shingle its mid‑tone grain. Exposure was probably around f/8 and 1/250s – the kind of bright‑overcast metering that Tri‑X handles in its sleep.
What it's like to use, eighteen years on
The TX‑2 in the hand is one of the most resolved 35mm cameras anyone has ever made. It weighs about the same as a Leica M, focuses with a long, smooth throw on the lens helical, and meters quietly and accurately. The shutter is electronic – a vertically travelling metal blade unit with a top speed of 1/1000s – and it fires with a soft mechanical clack that is much quieter than the cloth horizontal shutters of cameras from a generation before. The film advance is positive, the rewind is motor‑driven and pleasingly fast, and the camera is happy with any 35mm film stock you'd care to feed it.
There are caveats, as there always are. The camera is now twenty‑plus years old, the electronics are very much electronics, and a small but growing number of TX‑2 bodies are starting to develop the same fault: a failure of the small flexible PCB that controls the rear LCD and the format mask. When that goes, the camera is essentially unrepairable outside one or two specialists worldwide – Fujifilm stopped supporting the camera commercially several years ago, and Hasselblad never really did. The 30mm and 90mm lenses are difficult to find at sensible prices. The 45mm f/4 is not a fast lens. And the cost of entry is now genuinely silly: a clean TX‑2 with a 45mm currently sells for roughly £3,500 to £4,000 on the UK secondhand market, which is more than the camera cost new.
Set all of which against the experience of actually loading a roll of Tri‑X into one of these and walking down to a beach on a stormy afternoon, however, and the calculus shifts. There is no other camera quite like it. The Hasselblad XPan II is, mechanically, the same camera in different badge work; the various pre‑war and Soviet swing‑lens panoramics produce a curved‑field image that doesn't quite match this; the medium‑format Linhof Technorama and the Fuji G617 are larger, more expensive, and only shoot one format. The TX‑2 is the camera that asks the least of you and gives back the most of any panoramic 35mm body ever made. Eighteen years after that Tankerton frame was exposed, the format still feels slightly unfair – like a small piece of medium‑format performance smuggled into a 35mm body, with the dual‑format trick thrown in for free.
