Mamiya Mamiya-Sekor Z 65mm f/4 W

Put it next to the Pentax 67's 75mm f/4.5 and you can see what you are paying for. The Pentax lens is lighter, the body is a giant SLR you can hand-hold, and the kit costs less. The Mamiya answers with a leaf shutter built into the barrel, full studio flash sync at every speed up to 1/400, and the deep, tank-like build the RZ67 system is known for. The W in the name does not stand for any optical trick, by the way. On Mamiya's Z lenses it just marks the version whose aperture ring carries half-stop clicks between the full stops. Worth knowing if you meter in thirds and want to set f/5.6-and-a-half without guessing.

On 6x7 this is a moderate wide, roughly a 32mm equivalent in 35mm terms. Stop it to f/8 or f/11 and it goes bitingly sharp right across the frame, with the flat-field discipline Mamiya tuned it for, so brick walls stay straight and the ground glass holds detail into the corners. Wide open at f/4 the center is already excellent and the edges give up a little, which on a wide you rarely care about because you are usually stopped down for depth anyway. Contrast runs high and clean. Color is neutral with a faint cool lean, the kind of restrained palette that suits Portra and Ektar skies and lets you warm them in post if you want them warmer.

Flare control is good rather than bulletproof. The 77mm front element is large and the leaf-shutter housing sits deep, so a hood is mandatory. Shoot toward a window without one and veiling haze creeps in and mutes the blacks. Backgrounds are not why you reach for a lens like this. At f/4 with a near subject the out-of-focus rendering is smooth and quiet, neither swirly nor especially creamy. It stays out of the way, which on a 65mm wide is exactly what you want from it.

This is a working medium-format lens for architecture, interiors, environmental portraits, and product tables, and the leaf shutter is the reason it earns its place. You can drag the shutter at 1/60 and pop strobes that freeze the subject, or balance hard sun against fill at 1/400, which a focal-plane Pentax 67 cannot match without juggling high-speed sync. When you focus in close on the RZ's bellows, the draw extends and your effective aperture drops; Zone Light Meter computes the bellows extension factor from the draw and focal length, so the reading still holds at the film plane. For the 77mm thread, a polarizer or a grad ND drops straight on for landscape work.

The honest cost is the system tax. The lens is heavy, the RZ67 lives on a tripod, and you have to think about the leaf-shutter sync speed before you trip it rather than after. If you want a 65mm with active floating-element corner correction, that is the later M 65mm f/4 L-A, a separate optic; this standard W is the fixed-group design. Today these sell for a fraction of their original price, cross-shopped against cheaper Pentax 67 glass on one side and the pricier Hasselblad 50mm Distagon on the other. People still pick the RZ 65 for one thing the others struggle to give at this format: studio leaf-shutter sync with corners that hold, for well under what a Hasselblad wide costs.