Pentax 645NII

Half a second on a tripod, a cold ridge before sunrise, and you need the mirror still before the shutter moves. That is the frame the 645NII owns and the older 645N loses. The whole reason this body exists is one button. Mirror lock-up, the feature Pentax left out of the 645N and added here in 2001. Flip the mirror up, give the rig a moment to stop vibrating, then trip the shutter. On slow landscape work the gap between a soft 6x4.5 chrome and a sharp one is exactly that pause, and it is why people pay the premium for the II over its cheaper twin.

Everything else carries over from the 645N, and the 645N got the hard parts right, so that is fine by me. Real dials, each with its auto position built in, so you set program or aperture-priority or metered manual and skip the menu diving the original 645 forced on you. The SAFOX phase-detect autofocus came from Pentax 35mm bodies and tracks a moving subject. The standard finder screen is a plain matte, but you can drop in a split-image-and-microprism screen if you want a focusing aid, and the view is bright either way, with an LCD bar graph showing where the meter sits. The motor runs about two frames a second. It is a big body that handles the way a 35mm SLR does.

The meter is worth leaving in charge. Three patterns, evaluative, center-weighted, and a true spot, with the whole system usable from around EV 2 on up and film speed settable across a wide range. The evaluative mode is genuinely smart for an in-camera meter, smart enough to hold aperture-priority through a whole portrait session without babysitting. It also imprints aperture and shutter on the film edge between frames, so months later you can read off the negative what you actually shot. The focal-plane shutter runs from a long 30 seconds up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, the usual cost of a curtain shutter this size. Nobody buys a 645 to freeze a strobe.

The honest weakness is that this is a fully electronic camera that dies the instant the battery does. There is no mechanical backup speed, so a fresh cell and a spare in the bag is the rule, not a suggestion. The plastic-shelled body feels less like a tank than a Mamiya 645, and the older imprint and seal hardware can act up decades on. The II is not really a redesign either. If you do not shoot on a tripod, the mirror lock-up that justifies the price means nothing to you, and a clean 645N does the same job for less.

Today the 645NII sits where the N did, only a notch above it. Cheaper than a Contax 645 or a Hasselblad H, autofocus a Mamiya 645 Pro will never have, and the FA lens line stays sharp and cheap because nobody else wanted Pentax 645 glass. Landscape and portrait shooters who came up on it keep theirs. For the backlit church door or the high-contrast canyon where evaluative metering averages everything to gray, take a spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, then dial that into metered manual. Then lock the mirror up, let the rig settle, and fire.