Fuji GX680 III

Push the focus knob and the whole front standard glides out on bellows, a view camera that somehow ended up shooting roll film. That is the GX680, and it does not care that you walked in expecting a normal medium format SLR. This is a 6x8 studio monster that brings rise, fall, shift, tilt, and swing to 120, all on a geared front standard, and it weighs about ten pounds ready to shoot with the standard 135mm f/5.6 attached. You do not hand-hold this. You bolt it to the heaviest tripod you own and you commit.

The Mark III is the last and most refined of the line, slimmed down a little from the earlier bodies, more plastic in the shell, cleaner electronics. Power is the big break from the I and II: gone are the rechargeable NiCad packs, replaced by three CR123A lithium cells in the base of the body, with a pair of CR2 cells living in the film holder. An optional AA pack clips on if you want it, and it spares the lithium cells when fitted. The shutter is a leaf unit inside each lens, electronically timed from 8 seconds to about 1/400 plus bulb, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed. That sync, all the way to the top, is the entire reason studio shooters tolerate the bulk. Film loads into the III N holder, ten frames of 6x8 on a roll of 120, and you can drop in masks for 6x7, 6x6, or 645 to crop in camera.

The catch is that the body has no meter. None. You look down into a waist-level finder, or you fit the 90-degree prism, or you spend real money on the AE metering prism that finally gives you aperture-priority TTL. Without that prism you are guessing, and that is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app does the job the body never had a way to do. The leaf shutter syncing all the way up is also a gift here: a daylight-fill reading lets you balance strobe against a bright window at 1/400 instead of crawling down to a focal-plane camera's 1/60.

The viewfinder image is big and bright on that ground glass, and the front movements are genuinely usable rather than a gimmick. Twin knobs for rise and fall, a push-down control for shift that locks where you leave it, indexed scales for tilt and swing. For tabletop, product, and architectural portrait work where you need to straighten verticals or drop a plane of focus across a watch face, nothing else in roll film does this as cleanly.

The honest weakness is everything about its size and its wiring. Ten pounds, fully electronic, no battery means no camera, and the bellows and ribbon cables are the parts that fail and the parts nobody stocks anymore. A dead one is hard to revive, and a CLA is neither cheap nor easy to find. People cross-shop it against the Mamiya RZ67, which is lighter, more portable, and has no movements, and that comparison settles it for most. Buy the Fuji when you specifically want view-camera control on 6x8 and you already live on a tripod. For anything you carry, look elsewhere.