Pentax 645N

A wedding photographer in 1999 could shoot a whole reception on a 645N the way you would shoot a 35mm body: bring it to the eye, half-press, let the autofocus snap to the bride's eye, fire, wind. The motor drive runs at two frames a second. Nothing else in 6x4.5 worked like that when Pentax shipped it in late 1997. This was the first autofocus medium format SLR anybody could buy, and the SAFOX IV phase-detect system inside it came straight from Pentax's 35mm work, which is why it actually tracks a moving subject instead of hunting.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is the control layout. The original 645 made you cycle exposure modes through a button and push up-down arrows whose meaning changed depending on the mode, which is the kind of decision that makes you put a camera down. The 645N replaced all of that with real dials, each one where your thumb expects it, with the matching auto position built in. P, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, metered manual. You set it and you forget it. The finder is ground glass with a split-image center and a microprism collar, bright and honest, and the LCD bar graph along the bottom edge tells you exactly where the meter sits in manual.

The meter is the genuinely good part. Three modes, evaluative, center-weighted, and spot, reading down to about 2 EV, with film speed settable from 6 to 6400. The evaluative pattern is smart enough that you can trust it for most scenes, which is not something you say about the average match-needle medium format body. It also imprints exposure data on the film edge between frames, so you can read your aperture and shutter off the negative months later when you have forgotten everything about the shoot.

Where it shows its weakness is vibration. The 645N has no mirror lock-up. That mirror is large and it slaps, and on a tripod at half a second on a mountainside you will see the softness creep in. Pentax knew it, which is why the 645NII added the lock-up in 2001, about four years on. If you shoot a lot of slow landscape work, that single missing feature is the reason people pay the premium for the II.

Today the 645N sits in a sweet spot: cheaper than a Contax 645 or a Hasselblad H, autofocus that a Mamiya 645 Pro will never have, and a lens line, the FA glass, that is sharp and cheap because nobody else wanted Pentax 645 mounts. Wedding and portrait shooters who came up on it never sold theirs. For the backlit church door or the high-contrast ridge where the evaluative meter wants to average everything to gray, take a spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, and dial that into metered manual. The body's autofocus does the rest.