>>3576574>I think most people that shoot medium frame consider Mamiya to be the undisputed best camera in the marketI guess you mean the Mamiya 7?
It's mostly the lenses. They really are the best with a decent margin. Lenses that resolve upwards of 100lp/mm would be great on 35mm but they were unheard of in medium format.
Compounded with great lens performance in terms of resolution, the Mamiya is a rangefinder. This allowed them to make the best wideangle lenses in terms of (lack of) geometric distortion. *And* the widest ones for the 6x7 format. That, combined with their lp/mm figures, *also* resolve the most detail. And due to their rf design, are also the smallest.
Imagine anon, the highest resolving wideangle you can get happens to be the most rectilinear one *and* the smallest one. That's a landscape photog's wet dream.
With regards to the cameras, they just got things right and made a very usable camera. Big bright viewfinder and rf patch, integrated spot meter, aperture priority. Not many medium format cameras have that, heck not even many 35mm interchangeable lens rangefinders have that.
The only thing kinda comparable in the medium format world are the modern fujis (GF670 and the wideangle version GF670W) which are $2,500 and fixed lens.
That said, the lenses are slow and you can't shoot teles, so there's a tradeoff.
