Sinar Hy6

One of the last brand-new medium-format SLRs anyone bothered to design, the Hy6 carried the Rollei 6000 system forward into a world that had mostly stopped making cameras like this. Sinar and Rollei built it as a shared platform in 2007, with Leaf offering a rebadged variant, a modular body that takes either a 120 film back or a digital back on the same mount. So it sits in a strange spot. A 6x6 that focuses by motor, descended from the Rolleiflex 6008 line, governed entirely by electronics.

In the hand it is a square, dense slab. The waist-level finder gives you that big, calming ground-glass square to compose into, the same view that kept Hasselblad and Rollei shooters loyal for decades, and you can swap to a prism if you want the camera at eye level. The mount is Rollei 6000, which means it eats the existing Schneider and Rollei AF lenses, with the older Zeiss and Schneider 6000 manual glass usable too, and that is most of the reason the body exists at all. Those lenses are superb, and there was a real catalog of them sitting in studios when the Hy6 arrived.

The shutter is the interesting part, and it is not in the body. The body has no shutter of its own. Exposure is timed on the leaf shutter built into each lens, running from a long 30 seconds up to about 1/1000. The payoff is flash sync at every speed, all the way to the top. For a studio shooter dragging strobes into daylight, that matters. Take a daylight-fill reading in Zone Light Meter, set the lens, and you can balance sun and strobe at 1/1000 without the focal-plane sync ceiling that haunts 35mm.

Build quality is high and so is the dependence on it. This is a battery-driven, motorized, electronically governed body. Nothing happens without power and firmware, which is a different relationship than you have with an all-mechanical Hasselblad 500. The autofocus, the wind, the metering, all of it leans on the electronics. When something inside goes wrong you are not finding a local guy with a screwdriver. That is the honest weakness. Service is specialist, parts are scarce, and a sick Hy6 can sit for a long time.

The people shooting one today are studio and high-end portrait and fashion shooters who already lived in the Rollei 6000 world and wanted to keep their glass while moving to digital capture, plus a small group of film holdouts who love a modern 6x6 with a motor. The natural rival is the Hasselblad H system, and most people who go medium-format autofocus go Hasselblad simply because support is broader. The Hy6 stays a specialist's choice. If you already own the lenses and keep a backup body, it is a beautiful machine. If you are starting cold, the rarity and the repair picture are real reasons to think twice.