645 Body Only

by Contax

Product Details

Product Manual [9.09mb PDF]

• ASIN: B00009UU22
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 24, 2003

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Great camera--and at the price--it better be!, June 21, 2003

By 

magellan (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: 645 Body Only (Electronics)

I've been coveting one of these cameras for a while, but at close to the $2K mark, it's a little steep, so I settled for a Fuji model GSW690 III, a great camera itself, which I bought used for about half that. Even cooler, the image size is twice that of the Contax, since it's a 6 x 9 cm negative rather than 6 x 4.5. Like the Carl Zeiss lens on the Contax, it also has a very sharp lens. Still, if someone gave me one of these as a gift, I wouldn't complain.

Another reason I like the the medium format in this Contax is that digital won't be able to touch it soon. I've calculated that the typical 35 mm negative has about 20 to 40 million pixels of information. With digital cameras now achieving 10-14 megapixels, they've reached the lower end of the my estimate for film.

However, my Fuji 6 x 9 cm has 8 times the area of a normal 35 mm negative, which translates into about 250 megapixels, which digital cameras are unlikely to achieve soon, at least in the next few years. Maybe 10 years, I'd believe that. In the meantime, I'll stick with a great medium-format film camera like the Contax or my Fuji.