Mamiya RB67

Bolt a Hasselblad to a tripod and shoot a vertical portrait, then a horizontal one, and you have to unlock the head, tip the whole camera on its side, and recompose. The Mamiya RB67 does not. You grab the back, twist it ninety degrees, and the frame rotates from portrait to landscape while the camera never moves. The RB in the name is "rotating back," and that one trick is why this thing sat on a million studio tripods from the 1970s into the digital age.

It is a brick. Loaded with a 90mm lens and a film back it runs past four pounds, and nobody ever pretended otherwise. This is not a camera you sling over your shoulder for a walk. It is a camera you set up. You focus with a bellows, racking the whole front standard in and out on a geared track, which means it does macro work natively that other medium format bodies need tubes for. The waist-level finder shows you a big bright 6x7 ground glass, reversed left to right like every SLR of this kind, and you learn to nudge your subject the wrong way until your hands stop arguing with your eyes. There is a reflex mirror and a mechanical clunk on release that you feel through the tripod.

The whole thing is mechanical. No battery anywhere on the standard body. The shutter is a leaf shutter built into each lens, the Seiko design, running from long exposures up to about 1/400 at the top. Because it is a leaf shutter, it flash-syncs at every speed, which is the entire reason studio shooters loved it. You want to drop the background two stops and fill your subject with strobe in daylight, you can do it at top speed. Meter the scene with the Zone Light Meter app for that daylight-fill reading and the body's full sync range is yours to use.

The film backs are the system's spine. Each is a self-contained 120 or 220 magazine with its own dark slide, so you swap from color to black and white mid-roll, or hand a loaded back to an assistant while you keep shooting. The negative is the real prize: 6x7 centimeters, the "ideal format" that crops to an 8x10 print with almost nothing wasted, which is precisely why portrait studios standardized on it.

The honest weakness is the obvious one. There is no meter. The plain RB67 reads light not at all, and you either clip on a prism finder with a cell or you carry a handheld. The Pro S and Pro SD bodies fixed small annoyances over the years, double-exposure interlocks and the like, but never added metering to the base body. The other cost is the bulk and the speed of work; this is a slow, deliberate camera, and if you want fast you bought wrong.

Today it is the cheapest way into serious 6x7 by a wide margin. People cross-shop it against the Pentax 67, which is faster to handhold but slaps like a door, and against the pricier RZ67, which adds electronics most film shooters do not want. For a tripod and a controlled light, the RB still wins on dollars per square centimeter of negative.