Bronica RF645 - Wow!

[brian steinberger]

The RF645 is by far my favorite camera. I have it and two Mamiya 6's and use the RF645 more. It's handling, viewfinder, and metering all win against the Mamiya 6. Only ting the Mamiya 6 has going for it is that it's 6x6, which is awesome, and the lenses are the best optics in MF.

I'm sure its the print quality of your friends photos that leads you to believe his shots are the best MF shots you've ever seen. RF645's come up on ebay all the time. That's where I got mine. You should expect to pay between $550 and $700 for RF645 and 65mm lens. The 45mm is gonna run around $400.

 

[chipgreenberg]

keh.com often has them and their rating system is conservative. I hate buying something like this on ebay. I bought mine (65 only) from a local photographer. This was his last film camera. It was pretty clean, and a good price. I like the camera's feel and simple controls. Nice viewfinder/focusing. Doubt you'd see a huge difference from any MF of the same neg size, ie 645 or cropped 6x6. I've shot many 120 brands from Hasselblad to and old Kowa I owned for some time. All produced good images. The differences were in the systems, build quality, etc. The rf645 has great build quality. Simple controls. Nice finder. The rangefinder is often off at infinity on these. Mine was. The guy I bought it from didn't believe me when I told him, thought I was simply beating him up on price. I was, but it was off. He said he never noticed and had very sharp prints. I decided to try a roll before paying for calibration and got good results so I'm waiting on that for now

Good luck. 120 cameras in general are a bargain today!

 

[CK Dexter Haven]

I had the Mamiya 6 for a while. Great handling, nice viewfinder. Sharp lenses, but the bokeh of the 'normal' lens, when you could get bokeh, was pretty bad.

A few years later, i bought a Bronica RF645. Again, a great-handling camera. Feels fantastic. Solid. Everything's where it should be. The vertical orientation is a bit odd, but you get used to it, unless you shoot primarily landscapes, when i could imagine it would be a distraction.

My Bronica had to be sent back to the dealer (KEH) for a RF alignment. It was off vertically by a little bit - although the focus wasn't affected. After it came back, adjusted, the camera started to drain batteries when switched off. I thought it was my fault the first time, but the second time the camera had been sitting on a closet shelf, definitely OFF. I sent it back for another repair, but i never got it back. KEH, apparently, couldn't fix it. After a month or so, when they 'couldn't find' the camera, they located it and then sent it to Tamron for repair. Tamron had it for another month and still had no estimate on a return date. KEH offered me a refund, and i accepted. I probably should have bought another one, but i soured on the entire experience and i went in a different direction. Still, it was a great camera. Very compact, and the 75mm's bokeh is excellent.

 

[arunrajmohan]

Sometimes last year I got an old Bronica 645. Initially I had some reservations, but as I started using it, I suddenly realized that it is one of the easiest cameras to use (other than my Leica M3). 645 is one full featured camera in which I know what each and every button does. Relatively speaking, I barely know 10-15% of my Nikon F100. I just have one problem with 645's film advance lever which gets stuck once in a while. I have to switch off and restart and press the shutter release and it is fine. But is cost me at least a couple of films because I opened the camera to retrieve the almost done roll. I still love it and is my standard medium format camera.

Arun