The Autofocus Fix That Changes the Hasselblad X2D II for the Better

A medium format camera with a 100-megapixel sensor rarely gets described as fast, yet one specific change has turned a slow studio-style body into something you can shoot reactively on the street. The gap between "beautiful but sluggish" and "reliable in daily use" often comes down to a single feature.

That feature is, of course, autofocus, and Sean Dalton walks through it while shooting the Hasselblad X2D 100C II across Porto and Lisbon. Dalton's whole test rests on one idea: a camera should stay out of the way and let you translate what you see into a photo. He shot the original X2D 100C last year and liked it, but the slow responsiveness and the lack of continuous autofocus kept it off his daily rotation. The Mark II now has continuous autofocus, more focus points, and a new tracking system, and Dalton says it finally clears the minimum threshold of speed he needs. He's honest that it's nowhere near Sony territory, but it no longer fights him when a subject moves through the frame.

Speed is only one of three things Dalton checks. The build, ergonomics, and functional buttons make up the second, and here he's direct about how good the X2D series feels in the hand. The Mark II adds a rear joystick for moving and resetting the focus point, a new custom button, and a screen that tilts further back. He's assigned that custom button to crop modes, and the Xpan format has become his favorite way to shoot the skyline and boats along the water. Image quality is the third pillar, and the 100-megapixel sensor gives him enough room to crop a 38mm frame down to something closer to 100mm, so the 38V starts to feel like a small zoom. He also carries the 55V and reaches for the smaller prime more often.

The 30-to-100mm framing trick Dalton describes is a habit any high-resolution shooter can borrow. When a sensor packs that many pixels, cropping stops being a rescue move and becomes a real focal length choice. Shoot wide, keep the file, and pull tighter in editing without the image falling apart. This is part of a broader shift, where photographers treat a single sharp prime plus a dense sensor as a substitute for a bag of glass. It keeps the kit light, which is exactly what a travel photographer wants, and it means fewer lens changes in dusty streets or shifting light. Pair it with slight underexposure to protect highlights, the way Dalton does at half a stop to a full stop, and you have a workflow that leans on the file's latitude instead of luck.

Dalton is upfront about what frustrated him. There's no option to disable autofocus on the shutter button while keeping continuous back-button focus, which breaks the setup he uses on every other camera. The three-frames-per-second burst rate handled most of his street work but couldn't keep up with kids leaping off a pier in Porto. He also wishes the camera let him tweak JPEGs in-body, since the straight-out-of-camera files already look ready to post. His guess is that compressed raw could raise the frame rate.

Watch the video above to see the Porto and Lisbon shots that pushed Dalton toward this camera over his Sony and to hear whether he's keeping it.