Mamiya M645 Super

The thing the Super did that the original M645 could not: swap the film back mid-roll. The first M645 from the seventies used fixed inserts, so you finished a roll before you changed emulsions. The 1985 Super bolted on a proper removable back with its own dark slide, and suddenly you could shoot half a roll of color, pull the back, clip on a black-and-white insert, and pick the color up later from exactly where you left it. That one change is why studio and wedding shooters who had stayed away from 645 finally bought in. A fat SLR became the front end of a real system.

It handles like an SLR, not a brick, which is the other half of the pitch. Through the prism the finder is bright and large, and the standard screen carries a central split-image spot ringed by a microprism collar, so focus snaps either way you read it; plain matte and other screens drop in if you prefer. The advance is a flip-out crank you wind through to cock the shutter and reach the next of fifteen frames, each one nearly three times the area of 35mm. The shutter is electronic and quieter than you expect, running from eight seconds at the slow end up to about 1/1000 at the top. That top speed is the real step up from the original body, which stopped near 1/500. Flash syncs at 1/60, which is the number that stings if you light daylight fill with strobe.

The body carries no meter of its own. Metering lives in whichever prism you bolt on, and you should know that before you buy. The plain prism is glass and nothing else. The metered prisms read through the lens off a cell, and the AE prism adds aperture priority, but they are forty years old now, and plenty of them read a stop off or have simply died. A clean working metered finder costs real money on top of the body, and the prism on a camera you buy may not actually work no matter what the listing says.

Once you stop trusting that prism, the body opens back up. Take an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, and a dead or wandering finder cell stops mattering. You set aperture and that smooth electronic shutter straight off the reading, and the meter the old prisms can no longer give you lives in your pocket instead.

Here is the part people get backwards: the Super is electronically controlled, and a dead battery does stop it. The shutter needs power to fire at every speed, so there is no limping home on a flat cell. That puts it in the same boat as the later 645 Pro, which is also fully electronic and turns into a paperweight when the battery dies. Carry spares and check the camera before a shoot. Today the Super sits one notch up from the original M645 and a notch below the 645 Pro, the sweet spot for someone who wants interchangeable backs without paying Pro money. People cross-shop it against the Bronica ETRS and the Pentax 645. The Mamiya case holds up the way it always did: a lighter body, a deep stack of sharp lenses that stay genuinely affordable, and a finder that makes the big negative a pleasure to focus.