Pentax 67

Set a Mamiya RB67 next to a Pentax 67 on a studio table and you understand two completely different ideas about what a 6x7 camera should be. The RB sits there like a small appliance, waist-level finder, rotating back, leaf-shutter lenses, built to live on a stand. The Pentax 67 is the camera you pick up and bring to your eye like a 35mm SLR that ate a much larger one. It is a giant Spotmatic, basically, and that was the whole pitch: medium format that handles like the camera you already know.

That handling comes at a price you feel in your hands. The mirror is enormous and it slaps. People describe the sound as a screen door, and the vibration is real enough that the received wisdom is to avoid roughly 1/8 to 1/30 on a tripod, the exact range where a slow mirror box ruins a landscape frame. Pentax addressed this within the line itself, the 6x7 MLU added mirror lockup in 1976. On a pre-MLU body you brace, shoot at a faster speed, or accept it. The shutter is a cloth focal-plane unit with electronically timed speeds from a full second to about 1/1000, and here is the catch that bites flash shooters: sync is only 1/30. Studio strobe in daylight is awkward on this body in a way it never is on the leaf-shutter Mamiya.

The finder is the good part. Eye-level pentaprism, big and bright, with a real ground glass that snaps into focus, and the prisms are interchangeable. The meter was never in the body. It lived in an optional metering pentaprism, a TTL CdS match-needle finder, so a huge number of these bodies in the wild have a plain prism and no meter at all. If yours is one of them, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is the meter the camera never came with, and on chrome film at this size you want to place those shadows deliberately anyway.

Landscape and fashion shooters are who kept this thing alive. The normal 105mm and the wider 55mm have a drawing that fashion shooters leaned on for decades, and a 6x7 chrome off a Pentax lens still holds up against anything. It is heavy, it is loud, and because the shutter is electronically timed the whole thing is dead without a battery, with no mechanical speed to fall back on. A flat cell, not just a weak one, takes the entire range with it and leaves you holding a paperweight. People cross-shop it against the Mamiya RB67 and the Fuji GW690, and they buy the Pentax specifically because it focuses and frames like a normal SLR instead of a view camera you hold at your belt. That is the trade. You give up the leaf shutter and the rotating back, and you get a 6x7 you can actually carry up a hill.