Mamiya 6 (1989)

Push the button on the front and the whole lens sinks into the body. The Mamiya 6 has a collapsing mount, a little bellows arrangement that retracts the lens flush so the camera goes flat enough to drop into a coat pocket without snagging. Almost nothing else in interchangeable-lens 6x6 folds up this way. You learn the motion in a day and then you do it without looking, the way you cap a pen.

It is a rangefinder, which is the strange part. Most 6x6 cameras are waist-level reflexes or big SLRs, and here is a square negative coming out of a body you hold to your eye and frame through a bright finder with parallax-corrected frame lines that shift as you focus. The patch is easy enough to read, and the whole thing is quieter and lighter than any medium format SLR because there is no mirror to fling. The leaf shutter lives in the lens, so the only sound is a soft click, no slap, no shake. You can hand-hold this slower than you have any right to.

Three lenses anchor the system, a 50mm, a 75mm normal, and a 150mm, all interchangeable, all carrying their own leaf shutter. That shutter tops out near 1/500 and runs down to four full seconds, and because it is a leaf it syncs flash at every speed. That matters more than it sounds. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs with that sync flexibility, so you can drop a strobe into harsh noon sun at 1/500 and still kill the ambient, something a focal-plane body simply cannot do.

The meter is center-weighted and feeds an aperture-priority auto mode, and it is competent rather than clever. Point it at a backlit doorway or a bright sky over a dark street and it does what every averaging meter does, which is protect the wrong thing. This is where you stop trusting it. Read the scene with the app, place the shadows on the zone you actually want, and the square comes back the way you saw it instead of the way the cell guessed.

The honest weakness is the body's total reliance on electronics, with no mechanical fallback at all. The shutter and meter both want the battery, and the collapsing-mount mechanism and the flex circuitry inside are not cheap to service when they age. A dead Mamiya 6 is an expensive Mamiya 6, and a clean CLA is not a casual purchase.

Today it is a travel and street camera for people who want 6x6 negatives without hauling a Hasselblad kit or a Pentax 67. It cross-shops against the Mamiya 7, which is sharper and goes to 6x7 but is bigger and has no collapsing trick. The 6 stays loved because of that flat-folding body and the rangefinder quiet. It is not the camera that wins a spec sheet. It is the one you keep reaching for because it fits in the bag you were already carrying.