Fuji GA645i Professional

Tip it on its side and the thing reorients its whole personality. The GA645i is built to be held vertically, like a fat little camcorder, with a thumb grip on the right and the finder reading out as a portrait frame, so the natural shot is a standing person rather than a landscape. Then it fires with a soft electronic snick, no mirror, no slap, and you forget you are pulling a 6x4.5 negative nearly three times the area of 35mm, sixteen frames to a roll of 120. It loads the film for you. It winds for you. It looks like a bridge camera and shoots like a studio back.

This is the fixed-lens i revision in Fuji's GA645 family, the autofocus 645 that sat below the zooming Zi and beside the wide GA645W. Where the Zi traded a little corner sharpness for a zoom, the i keeps a single Fujinon around 60mm, a mild wide-normal that frames people without distorting them, and the glass is sharp enough that nobody who owns one spends much time complaining about it. The finder is the good part. Bright projected frame lines, automatic parallax correction, a center mark that doubles as the focus and metering point, and a distance readout the autofocus throws up so you confirm before you trip the shutter. There is a small built-in flash and data imprinting that can burn frame info into the film margin, along the edge of the negative, which press and catalog shooters actually used.

The leaf shutter runs from four seconds to about 1/700, and because it is a leaf it flash-syncs at every one of those speeds. The catch worth knowing is that the top end is aperture-dependent. You only reach 1/700 stopped down to f/11 through f/22; from f/4 to f/9.5 the shutter caps at 1/400. So you cannot sync fill flash at the absolute top wherever you like, but at a normal portrait aperture you still get 1/400 of sync, which is several times what a focal-plane 645 SLR gives you at its 1/60 to 1/125 X-sync. That is the whole reason to keep one near a flash outdoors. Pull a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app, set the ambient, and the leaf shutter syncs your fill up to 1/400 to open a backlit face. The built-in meter is center-weighted and fine in even light, but like any averaging meter it gets argued into the wrong answer by a bright sky behind your subject, so the placed reading is what saves the frame.

The honest weakness is that it is electronic to the core. Focus, wind, meter, and shutter all draw from two CR123A cells, and a dead battery is a dead camera, so you carry a spare and check it before anything that matters. The body is plasticky in a way the old metal Fuji rangefinders were not, and a real fault usually means you replace the camera rather than service it forever. These do not get nursed back to health. You find a clean one and you run it.

Today the GA645i goes to photographers who want medium-format negatives without the loupe, the tripod, and the ritual, and who do not care that it reads as a consumer compact from across the street. The cross-shop is usually a Mamiya 645 or the folding GS645, and the i gives up the mechanical romance in exchange for being fast, quiet, and pointed at people. It is the 645 you actually pack, which is why clean ones hold their price.