Mamiya RZ67

A fashion shooter in a Manhattan studio in 1991 has this thing bolted to a heavy tripod, strobes humming, and she never once picks it up. That is the RZ67 in its natural habitat. It is a studio camera that travels only in a Pelican case, and you do not hand-hold it for long without regretting it. People bought it to make 6x7 negatives of faces, and for about twenty years it was the default tool for doing exactly that.

The genius is the rotating back. You shoot a vertical portrait, then twist the revolving adapter and you have a horizontal, no need to flop the whole camera sideways on the head. You compose on a big bright ground glass through a waist-level finder, and the image is flipped left to right. You get used to it faster than you expect. Focusing is the other clever part. The bellows lives in the body, not the lens, so you rack a knob and the front standard glides out. That gives you genuine close-focus reach without extension tubes, though it also means you owe the scene some bellows compensation when you get in tight.

Each lens carries its own Seiko electronic leaf shutter, and because the shutter sits between the glass, flash syncs at every speed up to the top of 1/400. That is the whole reason studio people chose it over a focal-plane body. You can drag a strobe against bright window light at 1/400 and freeze a moving subject with fill, which a 1/60 sync ceiling will never let you do. The leaf shutter flash-syncs at any speed, so a daylight-fill reading from the Zone Light Meter app pairs directly with that sync flexibility, no math about whether your sync speed can fight the sun.

The honest cost of all that cleverness is the battery. The RZ is electronic where its older brother the RB67 was fully mechanical, and a dead 6V cell leaves you with one mechanical backup speed and nothing else. So carry a spare battery, or carry a second body. The weight is the other tax. A loaded RZ with the 110mm lens and a film back is a two-handed, tripod-or-nothing proposition, and it is the opposite of a street camera.

Production ran from 1982 into the 2010s, and the used market today is kind to it. A clean kit costs a fraction of a comparable Hasselblad, the lenses are sharp, and the 6x7 frame gives you more negative than a square Hassey image once you crop for print. People cross-shop it against the RB67, and the choice usually comes down to whether you want the RB's purely mechanical shutter or the RZ's electronic precision and lighter-feeling controls. For a portrait shooter who works near power and on a tripod, the RZ still earns its place in the case.