The core cube with lens on the front and waist-level finder, with the chrome accenting, mark it out as an older camera. There was no doubt a degree of novelty attached to that but I also found myself taking more time composing shots, even allowing for the slowness of cancelling out the reversed image.Īs mentioned earlier, the Bronica has a lot of 'retro cool' factor about it. I really enjoyed the waist-level finder on the Bronica as a change of pace from my usual camera gear (a bunch of Fujifilm X cameras). Prism/SLR Tires and Wheels, taken with the Mamiya 645AFDĪnother (perhaps the) key difference between the two cameras is the view finder: the Bronica had a waist-level finder (you look through the top of the camera at a reversed image) while the Mamiya is like any other SLR. It feels much more familiar compared to my digital cameras. The Mamiya, with a 6x4.5 format, throws away a bit of image top and bottom for a more standard rectangular frame. Instagram has popularised the format in the past couple few years (and more recently started to move away from it), but the feel and resolution from a 6圆 medium format camera that square format just felt right.
One of the things that really drew me to the Bronica (cool retro aesthetic aside) was the square format.
The Mamiya is obviously from a much more recent era in photography and despite both being medium format film cameras, they're entirely different beasts. It's a very different camera, providing some digital aids like autofocus and metering that the Bronica left you to manually figure out, as well losing the square format, but I thought I'd give it a try.Īlthough I only had the Bronica for a short while, below are my impressions having used both cameras now (and ignoring the fact the Bronica was broken). Given that I didn't want to spend that much just yet, I ended somewhere in the middle and found a much newer Mamiya 645AFD on eBay. This left me with a conundrum: to buy another S2 and risk another alignment problem, or look for something that didn't use rubber seals that corrode and have to be replaced at high cost.Īn obvious alternative is the Hasselblad 500C, albeit at probably twice the price. The owner was very helpful though and agreed to just refund me if I posted the camera back to him. It was too expensive to write off the cost and get fixed in London (almost the amount I paid for the camera!) and when I was back in San Francisco a couple of months later I didn't have time to head up to Seawood Photo for a repair. Sadly, it turned out that my camera was afflicted by a common issue with these cameras: the ground glass for focusing being out of alignment. Mendocino sunset, taken with the Bronica S2 I was really excited by how the first roll of film would turn out as we'd seen some gorgeous scenery on the weekend trip up the northern Californian coast. In May, I wrote about buying a Bronica S2 medium format camera while over in California for work.
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