Bronica RF645
Bronica RF645: the medium‑format rangefinder that turned the world on its side
There is a particular sort of camera that arrives at exactly the wrong moment in history and ends up being remembered, fondly, by a small group of people who happened to own one. The Bronica RF645 is one of those. Launched in May 2000 and quietly killed off five years later, it was the last camera ever to wear the Bronica name – the swan song of a Japanese marque that had been making distinctive medium‑format gear since 1959 – and it had the slightly unfortunate timing of being a brand‑new film camera at the precise moment that the rest of the photographic world was scrambling to go digital. Plenty of people who picked one up at the time loved it — I was one of them. Almost nobody else has heard of it. (Camera Legend, Wikipedia)
Pick one up now and the first thing that hits you – before the build quality, before the lovely tactile dials, before the surprising lightness – is that the camera is the wrong way round. You hold it in the natural "landscape" grip of a 35mm rangefinder, eye to the viewfinder, right hand wrapped around the grip on the side – and the picture you take is a portrait. The RF645's film transport runs horizontally through the body rather than vertically, so the 6×4.5cm negative ends up with its long edge running up and down. This is not an oversight. It is the central design conceit of the whole camera, and it changes how you see the world through the finder in a way that takes about half a roll to internalise and then stays with you forever.
A short history of Bronica's last hurrah
Zenza Bronica was founded in Tokyo in 1956 by Zenzaburo Yoshino – the company name an elision of his own first name and his initials – and shipped its first camera, the rather wonderful Bronica D, in 1959. For the next four decades Bronica made a string of well‑regarded medium‑format SLRs (the S2, the EC, the ETR series, the SQ series and the GS‑1), aimed largely at studio and wedding photographers who wanted Hasselblad‑class results without paying Hasselblad money. The lenses, badged Zenzanon and made variously by Nikon, Norita, Komura and eventually Bronica itself, were almost universally well regarded.
By the late 1990s, though, the medium‑format SLR business was a worried place. Digital was coming, the wedding market was beginning to shift, and Bronica – never a massive company – needed a parent. In 1998 it found one in Tamron, the Saitama lens maker who, by Tamron's own corporate history, was as interested in Bronica's optical patents as it was in the camera business. (Tamron)
What Tamron then did with Bronica was, for a brief moment, rather brave. Rather than wind the brand down quietly, in May 2000 they launched a genuinely new camera under the old Bronica name: the RF645, a clean‑sheet medium‑format rangefinder unlike anything else in the line. It was an immediate critical hit. The RF645 picked up the Camera Grand Prix Special Prize, an ISEE Award for Professional Cameras, and a TIPA award all in 2001, which is about as close to a clean sweep as a new camera can get in its first year on sale. (Japan Camera Hunter)
It did not, in the end, save the brand. Tamron closed Bronica's SLR side of the business in 2002, kept the RF645 in production a little longer because it was still selling, and finally pulled the plug in September 2005 – at which point the Bronica name, after 47 years and a long catalogue of lovely cameras, simply ended. (PhotoReview Australia) Total RF645 production is generally reckoned to have been somewhere in the low five figures, which is why decent examples now ask the kind of money you used to be able to spend on a small car.
Why it shoots vertically (and why that's actually right)
The thing that everyone notices about the RF645 deserves a paragraph or two of its own, because it is more interesting than it first appears.
Conventional 6×4.5 cameras of the era – Mamiya's 645 SLRs, Pentax's 645 line, Fuji's GA645 rangefinders – mostly transport the film vertically and produce a negative whose long edge runs across the frame, giving you a "landscape" picture when you hold the camera in the natural shooting grip. Bronica took the opposite view. On the RF645, the film cassette sits at the left hand side of the camera body (as viewed from the back) and the take‑up spool at the right, so the film runs horizontally past the gate and the long edge of the 56×41.5mm negative runs up and down rather than across. The viewfinder is rotated to match, with a tall portrait‑shaped bright‑line frame instead of a wide one. (PetaPixel, Luminous Landscape)
Why? Mostly because the people Bronica thought would buy this camera – wedding and portrait photographers, travel shooters, environmental‑portrait journalists – take a portrait‑orientation picture far more often than they take a landscape one, and turning a heavy medium‑format camera ninety degrees on the strap for every other frame is genuinely tiring after an hour. Reverse the orientation and the natural grip gives you the picture you actually wanted, with the shutter release still under your finger and the rangefinder patch still aligned with the world. The trade‑off, obviously, is that the few landscapes you do want require you to rotate the body, but most people who used one for a working week reported that this becomes second nature surprisingly quickly. (Michael Reichmann at Luminous Landscape thought the orientation was wonderful; his contributor Bryan Geyer thought it was infuriating because he shot 75% landscape. As is often the case with these things, your mileage will vary.)
There are three strap lugs on the body for exactly this reason – two on the body sides for the normal portrait‑mode carry, and one on the top edge so you can rotate the camera ninety degrees and still hang it on a strap for landscape shooting. It is the small detail that tells you the design team had actually thought about how the thing would be used, rather than just how it would be reviewed.
The body: 810 grams of considered minimalism
The RF645 in the hand is a surprise. It is roughly the size of a fat 35mm SLR – noticeably smaller than a Mamiya 7 and considerably lighter than anything in the Pentax 645 family – at 810g for the body alone, rising to about 1.1kg with the standard 65mm f/4 fitted. The shell is engineering plastic over a metal chassis, with a deep moulded grip on the right‑hand side that contains the two CR2 batteries that run the whole camera.
Look at the top plate and you can see the design language Tamron's engineers were working in: clean, dense, with everything where you'd put it if you were starting from scratch in 2000 rather than carrying over fifty years of Bronica SLR habit.
The big combined shutter speed / mode dial sits on the right of the top plate, with positions for B and 1s through 1/500s in single stops, then A (aperture priority) and P (program). It rotates around the shutter release rather than under it – an unusual layout but a beautifully tactile one, with positive detents you can find without taking your eye off the finder. The 1/500s top speed is a leaf‑shutter limit and we'll come back to that.
The shutter release itself is a chrome button in the centre of the dial, soft and progressive, with a threaded centre for a traditional cable release.
Forward of the shutter dial is a small lever marked "S" for the self‑timer.
The hot shoe sits centrally on the top plate, with the Bronica name picked out in subtle gold to its left – a small, slightly defiant flourish from a brand that knew it was running out of road.
A single‑stroke advance lever sits on the right edge and produces one of the loveliest film‑advance feels of any medium‑format camera. There is no motor drive option; the action of cocking the leaf shutter and winding the film on is entirely manual and entirely satisfying.
The back of the camera is where the RF645's electronic side reveals itself. There is no removable back – the film loads through a hinged door on the right side – but the rear panel is densely populated with controls. Top to bottom and left to right you have:
The diopter‑adjustable eyepiece for the viewfinder
A self‑timer ("⌚") button and a multiple‑exposure ("ME") button
An exposure compensation dial running ±2 stops in 1/3 stop clicks, with a recessed knob and a small white arrow
A 120/220 film‑type indicator (the RF645 takes both, with internal pressure plates and frame counters adjusted automatically once you set the back)
An ISO dial covering ISO 25 to 1600
An AE‑L (autoexposure lock) button on the right, sensibly placed for the shooting thumb
The main on/off slider switch
It is, as Japan Camera Hunter quite reasonably calls it, "the greatest little collection of controls in any camera I've ever used", in the sense that every one of them has a job and a sensible place. There are no menus, no displays beyond the in‑finder readout, no firmware. Switch it on, set ISO once, dial exposure compensation if you want any, and shoot.
The finder: bright, parallax‑corrected, surprisingly clever
The viewfinder on the RF645 is one of its quiet triumphs. It is a real‑image bright‑line finder with a single fixed magnification of around 0.6×, with parallax‑corrected bright‑line frames for the 65mm and 100mm lenses etched into the optical path. For the 45mm wide you use the entire finder window with auxiliary marks at the edges; for the (briefly available) 135mm Bronica supplied an additional accessory finder that sat in the hot shoe.
In the centre of the finder is a yellow rangefinder patch with a rangefinder baseline of about 59mm – respectable rather than spectacular for a coupled rangefinder, and a fraction shorter than the Mamiya 7's, but it focuses the 65mm and 100mm lenses without trouble. Around the bottom edge of the finder is an LED readout showing aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation status, and a small flashing warning if you've strayed outside the meter range or selected a combination the camera doesn't like. There is also a small green LED that confirms exposure lock when you've pressed AE‑L.
The metering itself is centre‑weighted TTL through the lens, reading off a silicon photo cell positioned to view the central area of the focusing screen, with a working range of EV3 to EV17 at ISO 100 – enough for everything except actual night photography. The system runs aperture priority off the A position of the top dial, or full program off P. There is no manual exposure mode in the strict sense, although you can effectively shoot manual by setting the shutter speed on the dial and ignoring the meter's suggestion of an aperture (you set aperture on the lens, the meter just suggests).
The leaf‑shutter lenses
The other half of the RF645 is its lens line, which is in some ways the more interesting half. The RF645 follows the Hasselblad / Bronica SLR / Mamiya 7 pattern and puts the shutter in each lens – a Seiko‑built electromagnetic leaf shutter speeds of 8 seconds to 1/500s, electronically controlled by the body. Every Zenzanon RF lens contains its own complete shutter mechanism, which is why the lenses are slightly heavier than they look and why the camera is silent on lens change.
The advantage of in‑lens leaf shutters is flash sync at every speed: the RF645 can sync electronic flash up to 1/500s, which is wonderful for daylight fill‑flash work and is one of the reasons wedding and portrait photographers liked the camera. The disadvantage is the 1/500s ceiling, which feels a touch on the slow side if you want to shoot a fast film wide open in midday sun. (The pragmatic answer is, of course, to fit a polariser, but Bronica also offered a dedicated polariser kit with a swing‑out filter holder that linked the rear filter rotation to the viewfinder, so you could see what the polariser was doing without taking the camera off your eye. Lovely bit of engineering, almost nobody bought one.)
The Zenzanon RF lineup as released was small and complete:
45mm f/4 – the wide angle, equivalent to about a 28mm on 35mm full frame. Eight elements, multi‑coated, takes 58mm filters, very low distortion.
65mm f/4 – the standard lens (and the one on the camera in these photos), equivalent to about a 40mm on full frame. A six‑element design, 58mm filters, close focus 1m. Famously sharp from wide open. Marked here on this particular sample as serial 0004728 and engraved "ZENZANON‑RF 1:4 f=65mm" around the front, with the Bronica logo on the bottom of the lens barrel.
100mm f/4.5 – the short telephoto, equivalent to about a 62mm full‑frame, sometimes described as "legendary" by RF645 owners and one of the reasons people who bought into the system tended to stay.
135mm f/4.5 – the longer tele, released later in the system's life and then quietly dropped because of persistent calibration problems between the rangefinder baseline and the longer focal length. Working examples are now extremely rare and command prices that are entirely out of proportion to their utility.
All four lenses share a common design language with deeply ribbed focus and aperture rings (the texture of which photographs beautifully in raking light, as the top‑plate shot shows), a depth‑of‑field scale, an infrared focus index in red, and a slightly clever combined depth‑of‑field/distance indicator that reads in feet (orange) and metres (white). The "R" mark on the distance scale is the infrared focus offset point, for the small minority of users who shot infrared film with the camera.
The Hastings frame: what it actually looks like at f/8 on Acros
The image above – the prow of fishing boat RX 83 on the Stade at Hastings, taken on Fujifilm Acros 100 in October 2010 – is the kind of frame the RF645 makes best. The wood grain on the boat's clinker‑built hull is rendered with the kind of mid‑tone separation that 6×4.5 negatives do effortlessly and small‑format negatives have to work for. The lettering of the registration number sits crisp against the weathered paint, and the highlights on the rolled gunwale at the top of the frame hold detail without blowing out. The vertical orientation is, of course, what you get for free with the RF645's transport: the bow of the boat naturally fills a tall frame in a way that would have wasted negative on a landscape‑oriented 6×4.5 camera.
Acros 100 is a famously well‑behaved film – fine grain, near‑perfect reciprocity behaviour, deep blacks – and the 65mm Zenzanon RF gets the most out of it. At an aperture of around f/8 and a shutter speed in the region of 1/125s, which is roughly where this frame must have been made, the lens is doing essentially nothing wrong: there's no visible distortion on the gently curving wood, no chromatic fringing where the highlight rolls off the gunwale, and the sky has the slightly creamy gradation Acros gives you when it's developed in something neutral like XTOL. Whether the camera deserves the credit or the film does is a question I have stopped trying to answer.
What it's like to use, twenty‑odd years on
The RF645 is, in summary, an unfussy, mechanically lovely, electronically clever camera that wants to be carried. It weighs less than a Nikon F5, takes negatives roughly three times the area of 35mm, and balances perfectly with the 65mm fitted. The advance lever is smooth, the shutter release is positive, and the leaf‑shutter "chuff" is almost inaudible – you can shoot one of these inside a church or a quiet street scene without anyone noticing.
There are caveats, and they are mostly the caveats of any orphaned electronic film camera in 2026. The body relies on a custom flex cable behind the top plate that links the controls to the main board, and rangefinder vertical alignment problems are increasingly common on used examples; the parts to fix them no longer exist. (Reddit /r/AnalogRepair) The 135mm lens, as noted, is now hard to find and harder to keep calibrated. The CR2 batteries are still available but no longer at every supermarket. And while the electronics are well behaved, when something does fail – usually the film‑advance sensor or the leaf‑shutter solenoid in one of the lenses – the camera is essentially unrepairable outside a small handful of specialist workshops.
Set that all aside, though, and the RF645 remains one of the most quietly desirable medium‑format cameras ever made. It is light enough to carry without thinking about it, accurate enough to focus a 65mm f/4 wide open in low light, and configured around the slightly heretical idea that most pictures, most of the time, are taken in portrait orientation. Twenty‑five years on from its launch and twenty years on from its quiet death, the RF645 is finally getting the reputation it deserved at the time – which is unfortunate timing, again, because there are vanishingly few of them left in working order and prices have climbed accordingly. If you ever see one for sensible money with a clean 65mm on the front, it is worth picking up. The world looks different through a tall finder, and you only really notice how much you wanted that until you've tried it.
