In the olden days, format snobbery was a little bigger. Real photographers used medium format cameras, stuffed with big rolls of 120 or 220 film, and they laughed at folks who struggled by with little toy “full-frame” 35mm cameras.
These medium format cameras were also distinctly old school, without much automatic control.
Back then, the Pentax 645 was an odd camera, an affordable medium format camera with auto-everything. Well, not everything, but way more than you’d get in the Mamiyas and Hasselblads at the time.
Which is all to introduce the Pentax 645Z, Ricoh’s new 51.5 megapixel body with a price tag of $8,500, not much more than a top-of-the-line full frame SLR body.
Here’re the specs: a 3.2-inch, million-dot tilt screen, a max ISO of 214,800, 1080 (60i, 30p) video and a proper pentaprism viewfinder. The body also has 76 weather seals. It should last you a long time.
What’s neat about the 645Z is that it brings medium-format photography into the realms of the practical, in terms of price and ease-of-use. Well, mostly. While 120 negatives took up more space than 135 negatives, they didn’t eat hard drives like 51 megapixel images.
Source: DP Review
