When you opened the deluxe black laquered hardwood box, lifting the lid on its piano hinges, you were greeted by a camera and lens that said "Hasselblad" all over it, but if you flipped it over, the lens was clearly marked "Made In Thailand". That's right, the MSRP $6,495* Veblen good shipped with the same SEL1855F 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS kit zoom that came with any Sony you bought at Best Buy, only with the Swedish camera maker's name engraved on it.
Now, "kit zoom" is practically a snarl word in camera circles, but the SEL1855 isn't bad as far as these things go. At least the outer barrel and mounting flange are metal, which isn't necessarily a given in the world of kit zooms. It's fairly sharp, although it suffers from the typical distortion at both ends that's endemic to inexpensive zooms. And of course it's slow-ish, with a maximum f/3.5 aperture at the wide end that falls off fairly quickly to f/5.6.
But this is a lens that sold for less than $300 by itself, or came as a roughly $100 upcharge when bought in a kit with an NEX-3/-5/-7 body. Scrawling "Hasselblad" on it and throwing it in the box with an obscenely overpriced camera was the icing on the insult cake.
Compounding this was the delay in getting the Hasselblad Lunar to market. It was announced in mid-2012 but didn't start shipping until the end of summer the next year. By that time, the Sony NEX-7 on which it was based was two years old and, oh, Sony had just announced a new short zoom lens for their E-mount mirrorless cameras...
You'd think that Sony, in its business communications with Hasselblad, could have said "Hey, we've got a constant f/4 zoom on the drawing board with Zeiss. If you wanna hold off until Q3 '13 to ship, you could have a credible kit lens to package with the camera..."
While I held onto the Hasselblad Lunar even after divesting myself of all my other crop-sensor Sony mirrorless bodies, I didn't use it much. The 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 just doesn't fit my needs for a walking-around lens. It's too short on the long end to snap a photo of a car across a wide street or a squirrel on a fence. It's too slow on the long end to do much indoor work by available light.
The pictured Sony Zeiss 16-70mm f/4 fixes these problems, being both longer and brighter on the long end (16-70mm on the Lunar's APS-C sensor is the same as 24-105mm on a full frame). The problem is they go for pretty much a grand new, and that's way more than I could justify for an occasional use toy camera. But then I found this one for a bit over three bills used on eBay! The seller was a little embarrassed about what I consider some minor cosmetic scuffs, and he happened to list it on the same day I zeroed out my PayPal credit balance, which is practically karma.
*Unsold stock was blown out at fire sale prices within a year or two. My used example was in LNIB shape at KEH for a song, relatively, but they seem to be turning perversely collectible now.
