One thing I like about the big Pentax is that the old glass from the late film era was solid professional stuff and wasn’t cheap when new. But it is dirt cheap now. I bought a dozen lenses that each make excellent large prints for little more than I paid for the one modern zoom I bought—the stunning 28-45. I’ve used everything from Canon L glass, premium Nikkors, high-end Schneider and Rodenstock large-format lenses, to Pentax 67 lenses, and I don’t feel as though I am compromising with older late-design autofocus Pentax 645 lenses, at least for what I do. A full complement of lenses for the 645Z cost what two (admittedly excellent) Fuji GFX lenses would cost (new, because they are too new to be widely available used).
The Pentax has enough buttons not to have to play menu games, too. It’s not just a great sensor—it’s great camera to use.
The 50-mp sensor doesn’t embarrass these lenses at all—a testament to the larger sensor not needing the same degree of enlargement, and the bigger pixels not being as demanding of ultimate lens resolution.
I considered the Fuji GFX-100, but I simply don’t need that kind of resolution for prints I make, and I’d rather not have to store files four times larger. I’ll let other people be disappointed in files viewed at 100% on their monitors.
Yes, I like traditional SLR designs, with optical viewing. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes make use of live view—I do. It does mean I know why I don’t want to use it all the time. And it doesn’t mean I have dallied with rangefinder cameras, but I have always returned to SLRs.
Rick “finding heavier cameras are more stable, too” Denney