Mamiya 645 1000S

Mamiya launched the 645 system in 1975, and within a year was answering its loudest complaint. The original M645 topped out around 1/500 with no self-timer, which was fine for a portrait but thin for anyone who needed to freeze a moment or step in front of the lens. So in 1976 Mamiya forked the line and built the 1000S. The "1000" is the new top shutter speed, about 1/1000, and the "S" carries the rest: a mechanical self-timer and a depth-of-field preview the base body never had. For the back half of the 1970s this was the camera at the top of the Mamiya 645 range, the one a working shooter bought when the cheap entry body left something on the table.

Fifteen 6x4.5 frames per roll of 120, almost three times the negative area of 35mm, and the camera still handles like an SLR rather than a brick. That is the trade Mamiya made when it put a focal-plane shutter in the body instead of leaf shutters in every lens: simpler glass, a lighter kit, and a system you could actually afford to grow. Through the prism the finder is bright and roomy. The advance is a flip-out crank you wind through a couple of strokes, and the electronic shutter runs a full 8 seconds at the slow end up to roughly 1/1000, firing with a soft clunk that is nowhere near the door-slam of a Pentax 67. The mirror locks up too, and once it does you can hand-hold this at speeds that would smear on a bigger body.

Here is the thing nobody tells a first-time buyer: the body has no meter. It lives in whatever prism you bolt on top, and those prisms are a lottery. The plain finder has nothing in it. The early CdS heads run on cells that drift slow and warm with age, and a lot of them read a stop or more off now. A clean working metered prism, or the later silicon-diode PD finder, costs real money to track down.

That is exactly where the body comes back to life. Skip the prism guesswork, take an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, and set the aperture and that smooth electronic shutter straight off the number. A dead or wandering meter cell stops mattering the moment you meter the scene yourself.

The honest weakness is buried in that same electronic shutter. No battery, no shutter, full stop. There is no mechanical backup speed to limp home on, so a 1000S with a flat cell is dead weight until you find the right battery, and flash sync stuck at 1/60 will fight you on daylight fill. Even so, this is the one to buy in the first-generation 645 family. It asks a little more than a base M645 and hands back the faster shutter, depth-of-field preview, and self-timer, which is most of what you reach for anyway. Cross-shopped against a Bronica ETR or the later modular 645 Pro, it gives up swappable film backs but stays light, cheap to lens, and a genuine pleasure to focus.