Pentax 645

You are at a wedding, the light is moving, and you want medium format negatives without a tripod or a waist-level dance every frame. That is the situation the Pentax 645 owns. You bring it to your eye like a big 35mm SLR, the built-in motor advances the film, the meter reads through the lens, and you keep shooting while the Hasselblad crowd is still cranking a knob. Few 6x4.5 cameras in 1984 put a built-in motor, a fixed prism, and a TTL meter in one shell and let you work this fast.

The body is a slab. It feels like a brick with a grip molded on, and that is the point: everything is in one shell, no separate winder, no clip-on prism. The viewfinder is a fixed pentaprism, bright and big, with a split-image rangefinder spot ringed by a microprism collar in the center for focus. You load 120 or 220 onto a removable film insert that drops into the back, which is slower than swapping a whole Hasselblad magazine but cheaper and lighter to carry spares. The shutter is a focal-plane unit running from 15 seconds out to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. That sync speed is the catch. If you shoot daylight fill flash outdoors, 1/60 boxes you in fast.

The meter pulls more weight than you expect from a body this old. It is a through-the-lens center-weighted system with an aperture-priority mode, and it is genuinely good. You can run it on aperture priority, watch the speed in the finder, and trust it for most even light. It is honest, not clever, so backlit and high-contrast scenes will fool the averaging just like any center-weighted meter. For those, read the scene with the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you want them, and set the camera in manual instead of letting the body split the difference.

This is a fully electronic camera, and that is the honest weakness. No battery, no shutter, full stop. It eats six AA cells, which is convenient at a gas station and terrifying in the cold, and if the electronics die you have an expensive paperweight rather than a mechanical fallback. The light seals on the film insert age and fog the edges of frames, so a tired example needs new foam before you trust it. The body's own sync stays pinned at 1/60, but Pentax did sell leaf-shutter lenses for this mount, the 75mm and the 135mm LS, which sync far faster, so the fix for strobists exists at the price of a dedicated lens and only at those two focal lengths.

Today the Pentax 645 is one of the cheapest ways into serious medium format. The lenses are sharp and cheap, the bodies are cheap, and people cross-shop it against the Mamiya 645 and the much pricier Contax 645. It is not a collector trophy, it is a working tool that students, portrait shooters, and travel photographers buy when they want big negatives without big money or a tripod bolted to their shoulder. Find a clean one, feed it fresh batteries, and it will hold its own against gear that costs far more.