Mamiya Press Super 23

Set a Koni-Omega Rapid next to a Mamiya Press Super 23 and the Koni wins on speed every time. Its ratchet advance cycles faster, the body is lighter, news shooters loved how quick it ran. Then ask both cameras to tilt the back for a little perspective control, or to focus closer than the rangefinder allows, and the Koni just sits there. The Super 23 does it. That is the whole reason this body exists. Mamiya bolted a bellows-driven rear standard onto a 6x9 press rangefinder, gave it tilt and shift, and turned a fast handheld camera into a baby view camera you could still shoot off the chest.

It is a slab of a thing. Loaded with the 100mm normal and a 6x9 back it has real heft, the kind of weight that steadies a slow shutter instead of fighting it. You focus with a coupled rangefinder, a bright patch in a finder that frames the 6x9 negative, and the lenses interchange across the Press mount, each one carrying its own Seikosha leaf shutter. The 100mm, the 65mm wide, the 150mm and 250mm teles, all of them fire that in-lens shutter, which tops out around 1/500 and runs down to a full second. The film backs are the system's spine too, interchangeable with a dark slide, so you swap color for black and white mid-roll or hand a loaded back off while you keep shooting.

Because the shutter is a leaf shutter living in the lens, flash syncs at every speed. That mattered to the PR and press shooters this camera was built for in the late 1960s, and it still matters now. You can drop a strobe into bright daylight at top speed and kill the ambient, the trick a focal-plane body cannot pull. A daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs straight into that sync flexibility, since the flash exposure holds at any shutter speed the lens offers.

The "Super" part is the movable back. It slides and tilts on its own bellows for the perspective control and close focus the rest of the Press line cannot manage. There is a catch worth knowing: pull the back out on the bellows and the rangefinder uncouples, so for those movements you focus by scale or swap to a ground-glass back and a loupe, the slow careful way. The body also has no meter, none, and never did. You carry a handheld or you place exposure yourself, and for a meterless rangefinder this size an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is simply the meter the body was never given.

Today the Super 23 is the cheap way into 6x9 with movements, cross-shopped against the Koni-Omega for speed and against a Linhof Technika for swankier glass and a folding body. People still buy it for that big 6x9 negative and for the one thing nothing else in its price class offers: tilt and shift on a handheld rangefinder. It is heavy, it has no meter, and it is slow the moment you use what makes it special. It is also the most camera your money buys if you want movements without a dark cloth.