Pentax 67II

You are standing on a ridge at dawn with a tripod, you want a 6x7 negative the size of a credit card, and you do not want to carry a Hasselblad kit and a separate finder and a film back that you have to remember to dark-slide. You pick up the 67II, hold it to your eye like an enormous 35mm SLR, focus on a bright ground glass, and shoot. That is the situation this body owns. It is the only medium format camera that handles like a fast little Nikon and gives you a chrome that fills a loupe.

The shutter is the personality. Focal-plane, roughly 1 second to about 1/1000, and when the mirror swings up it lands like a screen door slamming. You feel it in your wrists. Below about 1/30 you want a tripod or the mirror lock-up, which the body gives you, because that slap will smear a handheld frame. Flash sync sits at 1/30, which is the price of a curtain shutter this big. Nobody buys a 67 to freeze a strobe anyway.

What the II added over the original 67 is the part landscape and portrait shooters actually wanted. A TTL meter in the AE Pentaprism with selectable patterns: 6-segment multi-pattern as the default, plus center-weighted and a true spot down around 2.5 percent. The earlier metered prisms were crude enough that many shooters just hung a handheld meter around their neck anyway. The 67II finally gave the system a meter worth trusting, with aperture-priority auto, exposure compensation, and a self-timer to back it up. The multi-pattern mode holds up in even light, and the spot is right there when you want to place a tone yourself.

The honest weakness is the same as the charm. It is heavy, the mirror shakes the whole rig, and it leans on the battery for everything. Pop the cell and the camera is simply dead. The shutter is fully electronic with no mechanical backup speed at all, so a fresh pair of CR123A cells, and a spare in the bag, is non-negotiable. The older 67 was just as battery-dependent, so this is one place an all-mechanical body like the Mamiya RB67 has it beat. The AE prism is also a known failure point decades on, and a dead one is expensive to sort out. Light seals go gummy. Budget for a CLA when you buy.

Today the 67II trades for real money, more than the older 67, because the meter and the auto mode make it the usable one of the family. People cross-shop it against a Mamiya RB67 or a Pentax 6x7, and the answer comes down to handling. The Mamiya is a studio box with a leaf shutter and bellows focus. The 67II is the one you carry up a mountain. The Pentax 6x7 lenses, that excellent 105mm f/2.4 especially, are the reason the whole system has a cult.

The on-board spot is good, but when the scene fights the meter, a snowfield, a backlit portrait, a high-contrast canyon, a reading off the Zone Light Meter app lets you set your shadow placement before you raise the camera, then dial it in with the aperture ring or the compensation. The negative is big enough to reward getting exposure right, so it is worth the extra few seconds.