Mamiya G 50mm f/4 L

Corner sharpness wide open is what people remember. The G 50mm stays crisp well into the edges of a 6x6 frame at f/4, where plenty of rangefinder wides still look soft in the corners until you give them a stop or two. Stop this one down a single click and any gap closes entirely. Contrast sits high, distortion is close to invisible, and on a square negative that combination is exactly why the Mamiya 6 earned the reputation it has.

It is a multicoated wide angle built as the wide of the three lens Mamiya 6 kit, sitting under the 75mm normal and the 150mm tele. On a square frame its roughly 75 degree view works out to about what a 28mm gives on 35mm film, so this is a reportage width, not an ultrawide. Being a rangefinder helps. There is no mirror box for the rear group to clear, which let the designers pull the rear element close to the film and hold distortion and field curvature down. The mount collapses into the body when not in use, which is how a 6x6 system stays small enough to carry all day.

It built its following among travel and landscape photographers who wanted a true medium format negative without lugging a Hasselblad outfit. The square frame does half the composing for you. Fifty is wide enough for interiors and tight landscapes without the stretched corners an ultrawide drags in, and a lot of owners leave it mounted and treat the 75mm as the occasional swap.

The leaf shutter lives in the lens, so flash syncs at every speed up to the body's 1/500 ceiling instead of the 1/60 or so a focal plane camera would pin you to. The slow end runs out to four seconds for dusk and interiors. Zone Light Meter will give you the aperture and shutter pair for the light, and with a leaf shutter you can carry any of those pairings into flash and keep full sync.

The limits are worth knowing before you buy. f/4 is as fast as it gets, so this is no low light or shallow depth tool, and the rangefinder will not focus nearer than a meter, which puts macro out of reach. The harder problem now is service. Mamiya is gone, the body runs on a battery, and the collapsing collar and light seals around that mount are exactly what fails on a camera this old. Buyers cross shop it against the Mamiya 7, which gives a bigger 6x7 frame and a wider lens lineup in a larger body. The 6 holds its value for a simple reason: few square format systems pack this much resolution into a body this small, and prices have moved up to match.