Mamiya RZ67 Pro

You frame a portrait vertical, then your subject sits down and you want horizontal, and on most medium format SLRs that means tipping the whole camera onto its side and craning your neck. Not the RZ67. You grab the back, twist it ninety degrees, and a little frame mask snaps over the ground glass to show you the new orientation. That rotating back is why studio shooters bought it, and why they still keep one bolted to a tripod thirty years later.

This is a big, square slab of a body, and it is not pretending otherwise. It is a modular system: body, lens, back, and finder all come apart. The negative is 6x7, the so-called ideal format, because it crops to an 8x10 print with almost nothing wasted. Mamiya built it in 1982 to replace the all-mechanical RB67, and the headline change is in the name. RZ means electronic. The shutter is in the lens, a leaf shutter running from a slow 8 seconds up to about 1/400, and it needs a battery to fire. That trade scares some people off. Carry a spare 6V in your bag and forget about it.

The waist-level finder gives you a huge, bright ground glass, reversed left to right the way all waist-level finders are, and you focus by racking a bellows in and out rather than turning a lens barrel. That bellows means real macro out of the box, no tubes required, but it also means you owe the film some extra exposure as you focus close, and the body shows you a little scale for that compensation to read off and dial in yourself. Metering depends on which prism you bolt on top. The plain waist-level finder has no meter at all, so you are reading the scene yourself.

The leaf shutter is the part that earns its keep. Because the shutter sits in the lens, flash syncs at every speed, all the way to the top. You can drag a strobe at 1/400 in bright sun and kill the ambient, which is exactly the daylight-fill move studio and wedding shooters live on. An incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app gives you the base exposure, and that full-range sync means you can balance flash against sun without hunting for a sync-speed ceiling.

The honest weakness is mass and dependence. This thing is heavy enough that handholding it for a day will wear you out, and it really wants a tripod. The battery dependence is real, and aging electronics on a forty-year-old body do occasionally need attention, so a clean one with a recent service is worth paying for. Cross-shoppers usually weigh it against the Pentax 67, which is lighter and handles like an overgrown 35mm SLR but has a focal-plane shutter and that infamous mirror slam. The RZ is the studio answer. It stays quiet, it comes apart into whatever configuration the shot needs, and that twisting back still does a thing few other systems bothered to solve.