Pentax 645Z

As I confidently predicted last time, you can’t possibly please everybody when it comes to picking the best, the greatest, or the most influential cameras ever made. After we posted our list of The Top 20 Greatest Cameras of All Time, it came as no surprise that we received a ton of emails, varying in tone from pugnacious condemnation, to anguish, to polite suggestion, all begging to differ with our first top ten choices.  

The Pentax 645Z is a 51.4-megapixel medium-format camera that's styled very much like a DSLR. The well-appointed 645Z has a wealth of features in addition to its very large sensor, not to mention a very competitive price tag (for a medium format camera at least). Read our in-depth Pentax 645Z review to find out if it's worth making the leap to medium format...

The Pentax 645Z offers the incredible resolution and large sensor of a medium format system at a price that's a third that of the competition. It's an easy pick for our medium format Editors' Choice camera.

We just spent a week shooting the new Pentax 645z, the new, somewhat-affordable medium format system. We wanted to take a real world approach to how we would test the camera, so like most reviews on Fstoppers, this will be less technical and more about how it performed on the job. It was put through its paces at full wedding, a weeks worth of portrait sessions and a night shoot. Why Medium Format? Medium format digital cameras have been on our mind lately, as the market is at an interesting point.

By Michael Reichmann Milky Way #2 Pentax 645z with 35mm lens @ f/4.5 122 seconds at ISO 12,800 One of the most beautiful sights in the night sky is the Milky Way, the band of stars and dust lanes that stretches from horizon to horizon. Our ancestors could always see and wonder at it on [Read More]

Sept 4, 2014 – New In-Depth Review Now Online It was 2005 when Pentax first announced that they would be building a medium format digital camera. Unless your memory stretches back to pre-digital days you may not know that Pentax was one of the major medium format camera makers, with several very popular 645 and [Read More]

Photography and Camera News, Reviews, and Inspiration

Photographer Duo Dylan and Sara review the Pentax 645z.

Medium format digital cameras used to be essentially film cameras fitted with digital camera backs that contained an image sensor. In this way, professional photographers could keep using expensive gear that can cost as much as $50,000, and not have to buy a whole new system with an integrated camera back. Then in 2010, Pentax introduced the 645D, a medium...

Let’s start with the stipulation that this won’t be a formal review. It won’t be a first look, and it won’t be a field report.Rather, this is a report about my daily use of the 645z, which I purchased in early August, 2014 and the things that I have discovered while working with it. In July Ricoh [Read More]

Introduction: Pentax 645Z Review: an in-depth look at the 51-megapixel medium format professional DSLR from Pentax.

This category has something for everyone, whether it's ultra-high resolution, 4K video, high dynamic range, or pinpoint AF accuracy. For the enthusiast or pro who refuse to compromise, here's a look at cameras priced over $2000.  Read more

Announced in April 2014 as the replacement to the 40-million-pixel Pentax 645D, the Pentax 645Z is a weatherproof medium-format DSLR with a Sony sensor

A bit like a bigger version of the Pentax K-3

With live view, movie capture and extreme high ISO, is the Pentax 645Z the best medium-format camera ever? Find out in our in-depth review!