Bronica EC-TL II

Put it next to a Hasselblad 500C and you see two opposite bets. The Hassel runs leaf shutters in every lens and a fully mechanical body that keeps working after the batteries die. The Bronica EC-TL II went the other way entirely. It built a big electronic focal-plane shutter into the body, let you mount cheaper non-leaf glass, and added the one thing the Swedish camera refused to put inside the box for decades: a built-in through-the-lens meter that actually drives the exposure. For a working portrait shooter in 1977 deciding where the rent money went, that mattered more than tradition.

The shutter does most of the talking. It is a cloth-and-metal focal-plane unit running from a long 8 seconds out to about 1/1000, all of it timed electronically, which is rare for a 6x6 SLR of this vintage. The tradeoff is flash sync. It tops out around 1/40, so studio strobe work happens at one speed and you live with it. The meter is aperture-priority TTL, a behind-the-mirror stop-down reading of the central area taken off a silicon blue cell, working through the taking lens. You compose on a big, bright waist-level screen, an LED shutter-speed scale in the finder shows the speed it picked, and you press the button. It is fast in practice once you trust it.

It is a heavy camera. The EC-TL II is a brick of chrome and black with the squared-off Bronica look, and the focusing helicoid lives in the body rather than each lens, so the glass stays compact and the body carries the weight. Loading is via removable 120 backs, the usual medium-format dance of red dots and start arrows. Build quality is genuinely good, tight and precise, the kind of mechanism that feels expensive when you wind it.

Now the part nobody likes. This is a battery-dependent electronic body from the late 1970s, and the electronics are exactly what people warn you about. The metering and the shutter both depend on the circuit. The good news is the power source itself: it runs on a 6V silver-oxide cell, the PX-28 (also sold as the 544), which is still made today, so there is no mercury-equivalence headache to chase. The worry is the aging board, not the battery. When the circuit goes, the camera goes with it, and competent repair people for these are thinning out every year. Buy one tested across every speed, not one sold "as-is, untested, found in attic."

That is why the metering note matters here. When the in-body cell finally drifts or quits, you do not have to retire the body. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app sets your exposure, you stop the lens down by hand, and the camera shoots on as a manual instrument. Today the EC-TL II costs a fraction of a Hasselblad, takes sharp Zenzanon and Nikkor glass behind it, and holds a steady following among people who wanted a 6x6 SLR that metered for itself. You buy it knowing the electronics are the gamble. You shoot it because of how much medium format sits behind that finder for the money.