In 1954, six years after the launch of the world's first 6x6cm square Single Lens Reflex with interchangeable lenses and film magazines and three years before the same Swedish company brought out what has arguably proved to be the best if not most famous studio and fashion camera of all time, the 500C, Hasselblad created a different legend... and named it the "Supreme Wide Angle."

The new camera was a radically different design being neither a TTL nor a rangefinder and having a fixed Zeiss lens. Zeiss has been quoted as saying, "First we'll design the lens, then Hasselblad can build the camera around it." Whatever happened and in what order, Carl Zeiss and Hasselblad together created a very special camera using the Dr. Hans Sauer designed 38mm f/4.5 Biogon lens. This wide-angle optic was so superlative that whilst being the widest non-fisheye lens available for the 6x6cm format, with a 91 degree diagonal angle of view, it also displayed an incredible degree of distortion-free accuracy, less light transmission loss than any high quality "standard" lens and a close focusing capability of just 30 centimetres.

How many of us, had we been in Germany at the photokina launch in 1954, would have thought that the same basic camera and lens package would be still going strong, largely unchanged apart from a few design and handling details, 50 years on? The answer is, considering most of today's AF (and even worse, digital) cameras have a life span of perhaps only two or three years... very few of us!

Evolutionary Changes
The changes to the original Supreme Wide Angle have been minimal but important. In 1959 the camera's film advance knob was changed to a crank and the lens' shutter cocking action was linked to the film advance mechanism... so becoming the "Super-Wide C" or "SWC."

In 1980 the SWC was modified to take a Polaroid magazine and so became the "SWC/M." This conversion can still be retro-fitted by Hasselblad service centres and provides a modified viewfinder seat and tripod coupling plate to accept the Polaroid back as well as a film winding crank with ratchet action.

In 1988 the SWC/M became the 903SWC and in this millennium with more radical changes became the 905SWC which is the current model... sporting an improved finder with a spirit-level bubble inside the finder rather than on the camera body. This combined with the previously improved cosmetics of the "CFi" 38mm Biogon enabled the lens distance, aperture and depth-of-field scales to be directly read through the viewfinder to speed up handling. At the same time the lens was substantially upgraded with a redesign using only environmentally optimised glass containing no lead or arsenic in the elements... but I don't think the resulting image quality can have been improved (and I say that as a compliment!)

Space and science
Incidentally, back in the 1970s a number of modified SWC/M cameras were fitted with a reseau plate for photogrametric use. Using 70mm perforated film in magazines for either 70 or 200 (Estar thin-base film) exposures this special became the "MKW" camera for use by astronauts. However, this was not the first SWC camera to be used in space. In the 1960s SWCs were carried on the Gemini 9, 10, 11, 12 and Apollo 9 missions... and as a fact more applicable to the "Trivial Pursuits" game Sweden was able to claim a "satellite launch" in 1966 after American astronaut Michael B. Collins dropped his NASA Hasselblad modified SWC whilst on an EVA (space walk) outside his Gemini capsule!

There is a full lineage chart of past and present models on the Hasselblad Resource Page.

Also available from a recent catalogue, but to special order only, is the "SWCE", a motorised version of the 903SWC fitted with a built-in motor winder similar to that of the EL series.