Mamiya Sekor 80mm f/2.8 (C TLR, blue dot)

Bolt this 80mm f/2.8 onto a Mamiya C220 or C330 and you have the working portrait setup that wedding and church-directory shooters ran through the 1980s, when a Hasselblad cost more than a used car and this cost a weekend's pay. It is the normal lens for the C system, the 6x6 equivalent of a 50 on 35mm. The blue dot marks the last-production copies, which carry an upgraded Seiko leaf shutter and the best coatings of the run. That gives a slight edge in flare resistance and contrast over the older chrome and black non-dot barrels, though side by side all three versions resolve about the same. Do not overpay for the dot on resolution grounds alone.

On 6x6 the 80mm does not flatter faces with compression the way the 135mm or 180mm in the system do. Wide open at f/2.8 it is soft and glowy in the corners with a gentle drop in contrast, which reads as flattering on skin or as mush, depending on what you want from a portrait. Stop down to f/5.6 or f/8 and it snaps into proper sharpness across most of the frame. Bokeh is calm and slightly busy in foliage, never the swirly circus the cult lenses promise. The out of focus rendering is pleasant rather than dramatic, which is honest for a five-element, three-group Heliar-type design in a leaf-shutter barrel.

The leaf shutter is the real selling point and the reason studio shooters tolerated the TLR's quirks. It syncs flash at every speed up to 1/500, so you can drag a bright sky down and still pop a strobe, something no focal-plane Hasselblad or Rolleiflex SLR will do without a faster, fussier rig. If you are balancing ambient against flash outdoors, meter the ambient in Zone Light Meter and let the leaf sync do the rest. You get clean fill at 1/500 that a 35mm system would choke on.

The honest weakness is the system, not just the glass. The C bodies focus by bellows, so close-up work demands real exposure compensation as the lens racks out, and the paramender accessory exists precisely because the taking and viewing lenses do not see the same thing up close. The 80mm itself flares if you shoot into the sun without the hood, and the older single-coated copies veil badly in backlight. Filters are 46mm, a slightly awkward size that you will hunt for in ND or polarizer.

Today it sits at the cheap end of usable medium format, cross-shopped against a Yashica Mat or a beat Rolleicord. People still buy it because the C system lets you swap lenses, which no fixed-lens TLR does, and because a clean blue dot 80 plus a body costs less than a single Hasselblad back. It is an easy way into real medium format. Just budget for the lens hood and do not expect it to outresolve a Planar at f/2.8.