Fuji GS645

Fuji built this in 1983 to answer a question almost nobody else was asking: how small can medium format get and still be useful. The answer was a folding 6x4.5 with a bellows, a body that drops into a coat pocket and unfolds into a real rangefinder. Nothing from Hasselblad or Mamiya came close to that footprint. For travelers and street shooters who wanted bigger negative without a bigger bag, the GS645 made an argument no rigid medium-format body could.

You pull it open and the front standard rides out on scissor struts, the fixed 75mm f/3.4 lens snapping into position. That focal length is a normal-ish wide on 645, roughly what a 45mm gives you on full frame. Focusing is by rangefinder, a patch in the middle of the finder that you bring into alignment, and it is accurate enough for the modest apertures this lens lives at. The finder is bright and shows parallax-corrected frame lines. A built-in photodiode meter wakes when you touch the shutter release and reads out on three LEDs at the edge of the finder, marked plus, circle and minus; you adjust aperture and shutter until the center circle alone is lit. Simple, and it works, though it leans on a battery to do anything at all.

The shutter is a leaf unit inside the lens, running from a full second up to about 1/500, and because it is a leaf it flash-syncs at every speed. That is not a footnote. A leaf shutter means a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with sync flexibility a focal-plane body cannot touch; you can drop in fill flash at 1/500 in bright sun and kill the shadows without fighting an X-sync ceiling. Fifteen frames of 6x4.5 per roll of 120, loaded the usual medium-format way, and the body is light because so much of it is plastic over a metal core.

The honest weakness is the part that makes it special. The bellows and the folding strut mechanism are the camera's heart and its liability. Bellows develop pinhole leaks with age, the struts can bend if you are rough closing it, and a knocked standard throws off the rangefinder coupling. These are not bodies that shrug off abuse the way a brick of a TLR does. Buy one and the first thing you do is shine a flashlight inside a dark room with the back open, looking for stars in the bellows.

Today it trades on its size, and that turns out to be plenty. People cross-shop it against the rigid GS645S and GS645W, the fixed-lens siblings that skipped the bellows for durability and a different focal length, and against the Fuji 645 rangefinders that came later. The folder wins on pocketability and loses on toughness, and you decide which one you care about more. For a working photographer who wants a medium-format negative on a long walk and is willing to baby the bellows, there is still nothing quite this small that shoots this big.