Mamiya 645 AFD III

The mirror in a 645 AFD III comes back up with a heavy mechanical thunk that tells you a focal-plane shutter just slapped across a 6x4.5 frame. It is not a quiet camera. Hold it to your eye in a stone-floored church and everyone turns around. This is a medium-format body that handles like an oversized 35mm SLR, motor drive and all, and it never pretends otherwise.

Mamiya built this as the last of the AF 645 line, made from roughly 2008 to 2012, and by then the body was really a bridge to digital. The Mamiya 645 AF mount carries autofocus glass, and the back is interchangeable, which is the point. People bought this body to put a Phase One or Leaf digital back on it as much as to shoot 120 film. Run film and the standard 120 magazine gives you 15 frames of 6x4.5 per roll through a powered loading system that is genuinely fast once you learn the magazine. The grip is deep, the camera is front-heavy, and you shoot it standing up like a press camera, not waist-level like an RB.

The finder is a bright pentaprism with a real eye-level image, a relief after years of squinting into waist-level hoods. Autofocus is single-point and slow by modern standards, fine for a posed portrait, frustrating for anything that moves. The focal-plane shutter runs from 30 seconds up to about 1/4000, which is a wide range for medium format, but flash sync sits at only 1/120. That sync ceiling is the honest weakness. Studio shooters who want to overpower the sun with strobe at f/2.8 in daylight will be fighting the body, because a focal-plane shutter cannot sync high the way a leaf shutter can. The leaf-shutter lenses Mamiya offered are the workaround, and they were never cheap.

The built-in meter is more capable than most people expect. The AE prism gives you selectable patterns: spot, center-weighted averaging, and a variable mode that auto-blends between the two, with aperture-priority, shutter-priority, program and manual all on tap. It will get you through most studio and portrait work without complaint. Where it stumbles is contrast. Point this body at a window-lit subject with a blown background and even the averaging mode will protect the highlights and bury the face. For that scene, read it with the Zone Light Meter app, place the shadow on the zone you actually want, and set the exposure yourself instead of letting the body split the difference.

Today the AFD III sits in an odd spot. It is cheaper than a contemporary Contax 645, which is the camera everyone cross-shops it against for autofocus medium-format portraits, and the Mamiya AF glass is sharp and a fraction of the Zeiss price. What you give up is that Contax rendering and the bulletproof reputation. The electronics in any of these late AF bodies are the long-term worry. A dead mainboard usually means the camera is done, because parts are scarce and a board swap costs more than the body. Buy one working, treat the battery contacts with respect, and you have a film-and-digital workhorse that earns its keep in the studio.