Mamiya 645E

Buy a 645E and you are buying the cheapest way into Mamiya's deep 645 lens catalog, which is exactly why most people pick one up. It arrived in 2000 as the stripped, sealed-down end of a line that started in the 1970s, built to a price. No interchangeable finder, no removable back, no real motor drive provision. What you get instead is a fixed prism with a built-in meter and aperture-priority autoexposure, in a body that weighs noticeably less than the brick-like 645 Pro it sits below. For 645 negatives that print clean to 16x20, very little this light costs this little.

The viewfinder earns the body most of its goodwill. It is a bright pentaprism with a real eye-level image, not the waist-level squint a lot of medium format makes you live with, and the focusing screen carries a split-prism in the center that snaps in and out cleanly with the manual-focus lenses. Loading is on a fixed insert rather than a swappable back, so you commit to one film for the whole roll, fifteen frames on 120. The focal-plane shutter runs from a long 4 seconds up to about 1/1000, and it has presence: a mechanical clack with the mirror that nobody would call quiet. Flash sync is the weak spot at 1/60, the usual cost of a focal-plane shutter in a system whose leaf-shutter lenses live on the higher bodies.

The meter is center-weighted through the lens and feeds the aperture-priority auto mode that is the camera's whole reason to exist. You pick the f-stop, it picks the time, and for even daylight it is genuinely fine. It stumbles in the same place every averaging meter stumbles. Point it into a backlit portrait or a snow scene and it will expose for the wrong part of the frame. For those, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place the shadows on the zone you actually want, then set that exposure by hand instead of trusting the body's average.

It runs on a small battery and it depends on that battery completely. There is no mechanical backup speed, so a dead cell leaves you with nothing, which is worth remembering before a trip. The fixed insert also means no mid-roll film swaps, the one thing the modular Mamiyas are loved for. Shoot one stock at a time and you will never notice. Bounce between color and black and white on a whim and you should buy the 645 Pro instead.

Today the 645E sells for less than almost any other 6x4.5 SLR with a working meter, and it gets cross-shopped against the Pentax 645 and the older Mamiya 645 1000S. The Pentax handles more like a big 35mm and has the nicer meter. The 645E is lighter and takes the deep, cheap catalog of Mamiya 645 glass. People still grab it as a first medium-format body, the camera that gets you shooting 120 without lugging or paying for a full Pro kit.