
The RB67 SD is a Component System
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.
The RB67 Pro SD is a great professional camera that can hold it's own against even top of the line digital SLRs. I know, because I own and have used both. This camera, however, is definitely a "tripod camera" designed for use in making carefully posed and lighted studio shots or carefully COMposed landscape shots and close-ups. It's not the sort of thing to use when you need to keep your equipment really light for hand-held shots and candids. The complete camera with lens and film back weighs nearly 7 lb. The camera is a really big, bulky, tank of a camera compared to a lot of modern digital stuff. Add an additional lens, camera backs and tripod, and you've got more than 10-12 lb. to lug around - not the sort of thing you want to take backpacking or ski touring. However, with proper film development and scanning, the Mamiya will yield comparable or superior images to most modern, digital SLR equipment. The Mamiya lenses are excellent; the camera is ruggedly built and is designed for long use. I expect to get a lot of use out of it.
The Mamiya RB67 is a COMPONENT system. If you need a camera like the RB67, make sure that you are bidding on a COMPLETE camera, including the following: lens, camera body, focusing screen, viewfinder, rotating film adaptor, and film holder or magazine. Without each of these 6 component parts in good working condition, a Mamiya RB67 Pro SD will be unusable as a camera, but it might make a pretty good (although expensive) doorstop.
I bid on and won a Mamiya RB67 Pro SD that listed as a "camera" and "lens" but it proved to be a totally stripped down camera BODY and lens. The equipment, as purchased, was not usable as a complete camera until a film back, rotating film magazine adaptor, view finder and focusing screen were purchased separately. You can find this stuff on eBay or KEH. The additional component parts ended up bringing the entire purchase to nearly double my winning bid. The seller did not list the component parts separately in his ad. However, I suspected that there were missing components from looking at the picture that was shown, so I wasn't entirely surprised. As it turned out, the components that were sold at auction were in mint condition, and the components I added were in pretty much the same condition, so I now have a really nice, COMPLETE Mamiya RB67 SD in near mint to add to my collection of cameras.
I'm new to bidding on eBay. If I had it to do over again, I would bid more money on a complete, mint or near-mint RB67 Pro SD and not waste time looking around for the additional, necessary component parts. Once you have purchased part of a camera, you pretty much have to find and purchase the rest, or you have wasted your money, and, alas, time spent is also money spent.
I should add that this is not a camera for the casual purchaser. Unless you are into film development and (chemical) print making, you'll need a good retailer who can do this work for you or provide you with negatives and either JPEGs or (preferably) TIFs on disk so that you can get them onto your computer. Those of you who have gotten into photography with digital, should keep in mind that a film exposure is a PERMANENT exposure. You can't just erase it, and (these days) film exposures are considerably more expensive per shot than digital exposures.
Keeping all of these things in mind, the RB67 Pro SD is one heck of a lot of fun to use.
Review ID: 10000000004375344

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