Fuji GW670 III

The wedding photographer working a tent reception in August has a Hasselblad on one shoulder for the formals and a Fuji GW670 III around her neck for everything else, because the Fuji is the one she can shoot all afternoon without her wrist giving out. Hand it to someone expecting a brick and they are surprised. It is big, yes, a slab of a thing, but it weighs almost nothing for what it is. Fuji built the body around a fixed 90mm lens and refused to add anything heavier than it had to. The result is a 6x7 negative, ten frames a roll on 120, carried like a large point and shoot.

There is no meter in it. None. The top plate has a shutter speed dial, an aperture ring on the lens, a frame counter, and that is the conversation. You read the light yourself, set both rings, and shoot. This is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app does the whole job, because the GW670 was sold without a cell and never pretended otherwise. The viewfinder is bright and clean with a central rangefinder patch and parallax correction. Focusing is quick once the patch snaps together. The film advance lever cocks the shutter and moves the frame in one stroke. Loading is the usual 120 ritual, threading the leader and winding to the arrow.

The shutter is a leaf design inside the lens, and it changes how the camera feels to fire. There is no mirror, so nothing slaps. What you do hear is loud, a metallic ping and clang as the frame counter trips along with the leaf shutter, so this is not a camera that fires unnoticed. But because nothing inside swings, there is no vibration to fight, which means you can hand-hold it slower than you would expect for the size of the negative. Speeds run from one second up to around 1/500, plus a T setting for long exposures. The leaf shutter syncs flash at every speed, top to bottom, so a daylight-fill reading off the app pairs with a strobe at 1/500 in bright sun, something a focal-plane body simply cannot do. For an outdoor portrait against a hot summer sky, that is the difference between a flat fill and a clean one.

People call these the Texas Leica, and the nickname stuck for a reason. It shoots like a giant rangefinder, fast and handheld, but it lays down a medium format frame that holds up to any enlargement you want to make. The light body and the lack of mirror slap make it a natural for working on foot and away from a tripod, which is why it turned up on location shoots and long trips where lugging a Pentax 67 was a non-starter. Today it sits at the affordable end of 6x7, cheaper than a Mamiya 7 and far lighter than that Pentax, and it holds value because there is almost nothing inside to break.

The honest weakness is the fixed lens. Ninety millimeters on 6x7 is a normal field of view, slightly wide, and that is all you get. No swapping to a portrait tele, no wide for landscapes. Fuji sold the GW670, the GW690 in 6x9, and the GSW with a wider 65mm as separate bodies, so choosing your focal length means choosing your camera at purchase. The other quiet caution is the shutter count. The leaf shutter has a service life, and a heavily used copy may need a CLA. Buy one that has been exercised, not one that sat in a closet for fifteen years.