This is an interesting exercise indeed. The range of suggestions is amazingly wide.
But I am enjoying the desert island quality of these responses!
MF is interesting. I have had access to a Hasselblad for a little while, as one was used in a production of a play of mine and then hung around. Such a gorgeous machine but I didn't find myself using it often, perhaps because of a lack of familiarity or having no skill in focusing it.
Square-format Hasselblads are beautiful with standard 80/2,8 lenses and hopelessly ill balanced with just about everything else. Never got on with Rollei TLRs (or any TLRs) either. It's intensely personal.
Cheers,
R.
I have never gotten on with sheet-film cameras, even though I've used them extensively. I haven't owned one in years. I find that 6x6 is really delightful to work with.
Hasselblad handling is eccentric, much in the same way that handling a Leica has its own eccentricities. If you get used to it though, nothing else feels quite "right." After a twenty-year run with Mamiya C330 (33, 220) equipment, I switched to Hassy in about 1993 and never looked back. I've recently reacquired another Hassy kit for a specific purpose; much later gear than I had originally in the '90s. This time around, I could have gotten Bronica, Mamiya, Pentax or Contax, but I returned to Hasseblad because I know it inside and out. I was shocked at the used pricing of medium format film equipment. It is currently the least expensive I've ever seen it.
What makes this particular configuration of camera (Hasselblad, Bronica) so attractive to me is the square format and the ability to be almost unlimited in customizing your system to suit you and the tasks you have at hand.
That it is truly a modular system and can be easily and quickly configured any way you need it to do pretty much any job is a huge benefit. The greatest advance in the Hassleblad line was probably the acute-matte focusing screens and they're availalble in a variety of styles from plain matte to having the old-style split image prism and microprism surrounding that. There are etched grids, microprisms, and just about any style you can imagine available. They are such an improvement over the earlier ground-glass focusing screens as to make them an entirely different camera. Interchangeable roll-film backs mean that you're not tied to a specific ISO or type of film.
I'm not necessarily advocating Hasselblad as the do-all end-all 'cause it isn't, but sometimes the discussion of the eccentricity factor that's brought out in threads like this over-rides the practicality of the system. If you liked that old Hasselblad you were able to play with, it may be worth re-evaluating Hasselblad with a later Acute-matte screen that agrees with the way you like to focus.
