Bronica ETRsi

Saturday afternoon, a hotel ballroom, and the wedding photographer is firing fill flash straight into window light at 1/500. Nobody else in the room can do that. The Bronica ETRsi puts a leaf shutter inside every lens, which means flash syncs at every speed it has, all the way to the top. That single fact is why so many 1990s wedding albums got shot on this camera instead of a focal-plane SLR that strands you down around 1/30 to 1/60 the second a flash is in the frame.

The ETRsi is a 645 system, the last and most refined of the ETR line that Bronica started in the mid-1970s. You get fifteen frames of 6x4.5 on a roll of 120, more if you swap to a 220 back, and the backs come off mid-roll with a dark slide so you can jump from black-and-white to color between shots. Out of the box it is a waist-level finder and a ground glass: bright, big, laterally reversed, and the lateral flip alone keeps you deliberate. Most working shooters bolted on the AE prism instead, and the common one was the AE-II, which is center-weighted and gives aperture-priority auto. That meter is fine, not brilliant. It leans on the middle of the frame, so a backlit veil or a white dress against a dark suit can still fool it the way any biased pattern gets fooled.

Handling is all heft and clack. The body is electronically timed and runs off a single 6V cell tucked in the grip, with one mechanical backup speed if the battery dies on you, which it will, usually at the worst moment. The mirror and the leaf shutter together make a solid mechanical clunk, less violent than a Pentax 67 but you still know a frame happened. Focus is on the lens barrel against that ground glass, and the Zenzanon-PE glass is sharp and contrasty and cheap on the used market now in a way that still surprises people.

The honest weakness is the electronics and the battery dependence. No cell, no camera, give or take that one fallback speed, and the light seals on a thirty-year-old back go brittle and start fogging frames if nobody has touched them. A CLA is not free. But the cameras were built to grind through hundreds of weddings, so most survivors have plenty of life left.

The flash trick is the whole reason to reach past a focal-plane body, and it rewards a little planning. Take a daylight-fill reading in the Zone Light Meter app, set the ambient where you want it, and because the leaf shutter syncs at any speed you are never boxed in by a sync ceiling. People cross-shop the ETRsi against the Mamiya 645 and the Pentax 645, and it usually wins on price and on that flash trick. It loses on autofocus, because it never had any, and never needed it.