Mamiya RZ67 Pro II

Mamiya put the RZ67 Pro II out in 1995 to fix the camera they already had, not to replace it. The original RZ67 from 1982 had taken the all-mechanical RB67 and gone electronic, which gave you the rotating back and the bellows focus that studio shooters loved. The Pro II just sanded off the rough edges. Half-stop shutter increments instead of full stops. A fine-focus knob so you could nail critical sharpness on the ground glass without nudging the big rack. A second frame counter so you could read your shot number no matter which way the back was turned. None of it was glamorous. All of it mattered when you were shooting tethered for eight hours.

The thing is a brick. A loaded RZ with the 110mm and the waist-level finder runs past five pounds, and the whole point is that you put it on a tripod and leave it there. Focusing is by bellows, which means the lens stays put and the front standard racks out, and that is why close-focus on this system is so good and why nobody hand-holds it for long. The waist-level finder gives you a huge, bright 6x7 ground glass that you look down into, reversed left to right, which feels wrong for about a week and then feels like the only honest way to compose a portrait.

There is no meter in the body. The RZ is a dumb box that fires leaf shutters very precisely, and metering was always somebody else's job. You either added the AE prism, which gives you aperture-priority and three metering patterns, or you read the light yourself. The body is also effectively battery-dependent. The only no-battery trick is a fixed emergency release stuck at about 1/400, which is almost useless, so a dead cell may as well mean a dead shutter. People forget this and find out in a cold parking lot.

Every lens carries its own Seiko leaf shutter running from eight seconds to about 1/400, and because it is a leaf shutter it flash-syncs at every speed. That is the whole reason studio and editorial shooters bought into the system. You can drag the shutter, balance strobe against a bright window, and never trip over a sync-speed ceiling. For daylight fill, an incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs cleanly with that sync flexibility; you set the strobe to the shadow and let the leaf shutter hold the highlight wherever you want it.

Today the RZ67 Pro II is the medium-format workhorse people buy when they want 6x7 negatives and do not need to leave the room. It is heavier and slower than a Pentax 67 and less portable than a Hasselblad, and that is exactly the trade. The honest weakness is the electronics. When the body or a lens shutter dies, a CLA is not cheap and not every tech will touch the boards. Buy one that has been recently serviced, keep spare batteries, and it will outlast your interest in shooting film.