The XPAN Experiment.
The year was 2014 and I remember sitting on my couch in Seattle, looking through listings for 35mm cameras as I had been starting to get more serious about photography and was looking to extend into film from digital. I had narrowed the selection down to two choices - the Leica M3 and the Hasselblad XPan. Both were expensive film cameras - around $1,000 at the time, and getting both seemed both unnecessary and out of budget. Ultimately, I decided on the M3 - a camera I use still to this day and is one of my favorite cameras I have ever used. I figured I could wait a few years and then go for the XPan.
Unfortunately, in the following years, the prices for the XPan shot up astronomically and it wasnt until 2022 that I found one again at a reasonable price - although it was almost double what I had looked at back in 2014. I was so excited the day I received the camera. The rangefinder focusing and format of the body felt familiar enough while still having a unique shooting experience. The build quality, function, and overall usage of the camera was even better than I had planned for in my mind. However, two years afterwards, I decided to sell it. I want to talk a little bit about my experience of using the camera, the things I loved about it, why I sold it, and ultimately, why I don't really miss it.
I am not running a review site, so I will leave out all of the technical breakdowns and reviews, but just so we are all on the same page, a little basic information is needed on why the XPan is so unique. It is a 35mm film camera that has a variable film gate to change from shooting regular full frame format, and an ultra wide, panoramic format. The beauty is that it shoots the negatives on 35mm, and not a cropped medium format like most panoramic cameras. This allows the size to be more compact and the operating costs to be slightly lower as you can shoot 21 panoramic photos on a standard roll of 35mm film, rather than somewhere between 4 and 8 on a medium format crop.
Within the viewfinder, the frame lines are for a 24x65mm frame, allowing you to compose, and think, in a wider format. More than any other camera I have used in my life, the XPan really had a way of making me think differently about what I was seeing and how I wanted to capture it.
So, what I loved about the camera really comes down to exactly that - a change in perspective. Of course, there is the change in perspective that comes naturally with a different format, but more than the physical difference, I felt that format was a driving factor into completely changing how I though about photography. When looking through the viewfinder, there are ways that I instinctively compose and frame a photo. With the M3, for example, it happens naturally and fluidly, but with the XPan, the familiarity was gone and forced me to slow down and think creatively about how best to capture a scene in a wide format. More than just compositions, using the XPan changed what I wanted to take pictures of. Something as simple as using a wider frame fundamentally changed what I saw as interesting. Landscapes or buildings that were previously uninspiring to me had a new appeal based on the visual context around them. It is hard for me to fully articulate the change in mindset that I experienced in part because I am not sure I completely understand it myself. So much of my experience using the XPan felt like a subconscious shift in perception that could only come from a camera that made the panoramic photo part of the initial experience. Taking a photo and then cropping it afterwards couldn't offer the same friction-less experience that the XPan did.
However, from the start, there was always one glaring issue with the XPan that had me ill at ease whenever I used it. Longevity. The XPan was discontinued in the early 2000s and not too long after, Hasselblad stopped offering repairs for it. Now, my Leica M3 was made it 1955, however, it is a purely mechanical camera that will always have the ability to be repaired if something goes wrong. The XPan on the other hand has plenty of electronics bottled up inside of it that more and more came to feel like a ticking time bomb. Every time I left the house with the camera, I felt nervous that at any point, if something were to damage it, there was a very real chance that it would be dead for good. No chance of repair unless I bought another XPan to share its components with. This simple fact felt wholly at odds with my approach to photography and art as a whole. These cameras are tools to be used. A tool to help communicate an idea. The XPan, more and more, was starting to feel like a precious object. From the moment I started worrying about it getting damaged in use, my enjoyment in that use started to diminish. In stark contrast to my experience of using the M3, a seemingly bulletproof camera made of brass, I found myself cautious and protective when the XPan was slung around my neck.
I ended up selling the XPan in 2024 for this exact reason. Although my M3 is still a rare, beautiful, and expensive camera, I never think about needing to protect it. It is a tool that is purely in service to the experience of photography. Simply - it gets out of the way. However, the XPan to me felt like an experience with the camera at the center. It was a wonderful experience, and one that challenged my concepts of composition and at times, photography as a whole. However, I always felt that the camera was at the forefront of my mind, not the thing I was taking a photo of. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing across the board, but for me, how I use photography, and what I want to feel through the process of taking a picture, it seemed opposed to all of those things in a way that the M3 never has been.
I am very lucky to have had the experience of shooting the XPan for a few years, and I can't recommend it enough to any photographer who hasn't tried one. It will fundamentally challenge basic ideas about composition and capture. However, for me, I am happiest with a camera that acts as a friction-less tool rather than a unique experience.