Mamiya M645

Put a Mamiya M645 next to a Bronica ETR and you are looking at the two ways people first got into 645 without going broke. The Bronica went all-in on leaf shutters in every lens, flash sync at any speed, modular everything. Mamiya did the opposite and built a focal-plane shutter into the body, which meant the lenses stayed simpler and cheaper, and the whole kit was lighter than you expect for the negative it produces. For decades that was the trade: Bronica if you lit everything with strobe, Mamiya if you mostly shot available light and wanted a glass collection you could actually afford.

Fifteen frames on a roll of 120, each one nearly three times the area of 35mm, and you feel that in the prints long before you can explain why. That is the reason you carry it. The body itself handles like a fat SLR rather than a brick. Through the prism the finder is bright and big, and on the standard screen the microprism center spot snaps focus fast. A split-image screen was an easy swap if you preferred it. The advance is a flip-out crank you wind through several turns to cock the shutter and reach the next frame. The shutter is electronic, eight full seconds at the slow end up to about 1/500 at the top, with a soft mechanical clunk that is nothing like the door-slam of a Pentax 67, and flash syncs at 1/60. You can hand-hold this thing at speeds that would smear on the bigger bodies.

Loading takes a beat to learn. Early M645 bodies use fixed inserts rather than the swappable backs the later 645 Super and Pro made famous, so you finish a roll before you change emulsions. The metering lived in the finder, not the body, which is the catch worth knowing. The plain prism has no meter at all. The early CdS metered prisms run on aging cells that drift slow and warm, while the later PD prism switched to a silicon photo diode and the AE prism added aperture-priority automation. Plenty of the older CdS finders read a stop or more off today, and a clean working prism is not cheap to track down.

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 where you want them, and the dead or wandering cell stops mattering. It becomes the accurate meter the older prisms can no longer be, and you set aperture and that smooth electronic shutter straight off the reading.

The honest weakness is that electronic shutter. With no battery there is no shutter at all, no mechanical backup speed to limp home on. A 645 in your bag with a dead cell is a paperweight until you find the right size, so you carry spares and you check the battery before a shoot the way you check it on nothing else.

These days the M645 is the cheap entry into medium format that still delivers studio-grade negatives. People cross-shop it against the Bronica ETR and the later Mamiya 645 Pro, and the trade-off holds. You give up interchangeable backs and leaf-shutter flash sync, and in return you get a lighter body, cheaper lenses that are genuinely sharp, and a finder that makes focusing a pleasure. For portrait and street shooters who want the big frame and refuse to lug a Pentax 67 to get it, it still earns its spot in the bag.