Those in the know believe that a certain series of rangefinder cameras dating from 1954, and still in production, arguably has a more accurate focusing system utilising lenses from a 21mm wide-angle to 50mm standard than most AF cameras and, with practice in certain situations (especially poor light), has a focusing system almost as fast in operation. This may seem hard to accept by readers but there have been American magazine and internet site tests which show that even when tested on a top pro-spec camera such as the Nikon F5 manual focusing can be up to 100% more accurate than auto-focusing. And of course the advantages of fast and accurate coincident image focusing systems offered by the 35mm rangefinder camera are just as applicable in manual focus medium format cameras.

I had this in the back of my mind when I used a Mamiya 7... and even when the weather conditions turned poor, thanks to the extremely bright Albada-type viewfinder I found the camera just as easy to operate as my Leica M3.

Dual Format
The Mamiya 7 was launched as a follow-up to the 6x6cm Mamiya 6 in order to take full advantage of the 6x7cm "ideal" format then being universally adopted by professional photographers. The 6x7cm format has approximately the same aspect ratio as standard sized printing papers (10x8, 16x12, 20x16 inches) and the nominal extra centimetre of film means that wasteful cropping from 6x6cm, especially with colour transparencies, becomes a thing of the past.

When the Mamiya 6 was marketed the user was able to mask down the film gate internally to accommodate either a smaller "ideal" 6x4.5 format or a panoramic 24x54mm format providing twenty exposures on a standard 36-exposure film. Whereas the Mamiya 7 has no need to accommodate an extra ideal-format mask (and would the user want to crop down to 6x6cm or 6x4.5) there is provision to accept the same basic 35mm panorama kit of parts, albeit with an extended mask, for the nominal 7cm wide film gate.

35mm "Panorama" kit
The panorama kit at first sight looks a bit of a Heath Robinson affair consisting of a flexible plastic panorama mask insert, 35mm film cassette holder, take-up spool/pressure bar and external rewind crank. Whereas the camera is so simple to operate you really don't have to refer to an instruction book, the panorama kit does take some practice to fit, load and remove before making the change from 120 roll to 35mm and back to 120 roll whilst in the field. The first time I did just that I left the mask in the film gate and tore the following 120 film into three ragged strips on the protruding 35mm film guides!

That said, the 35mm panorama kit is an ingenious and very workable solution to the camera designer's problem of adapting a smaller film format into a larger film chamber and keeping the film fully tensioned and tolerably flat. My only reservation about the kit is that the plastic 35mm film gate could have been more accurately etched or laser-cut from metal (flexible phosphor-bronze comes to mind) for a perfectly rectangular aperture... the plastic gate on mine was slightly rough at one corner which was magnified on all enlargements. Perhaps I wouldn't have noticed had I not also made perfectly bordered enlargements from the Hasselblad XPan, an altogether different camera but producing similar images.