Technical Cameras I Have Used
I hear from people fairly often with questions about my experience with technical cameras. Sometimes it's a quick one, about gear choices, how something has held up over time, how to mount a lens someone just picked up secondhand. Other times it's a longer conversation, like one I had recently with someone who'd been chasing better image quality for months without finding it, trying to decide whether to switch systems entirely or just live with what he had.
What strikes me isn't any one question, it's who's asking. Some are just discovering that medium format digital exists at all. Some are working photographers years into their career chasing a specific answer. Some already own a technical camera and are quietly wondering if they made the wrong call.
That's part of why I'm writing this. Technical cameras reward you with image quality you can't easily get elsewhere, but the path to figuring out what actually works is long, and very little of it is written down in one place. I went through that path across four different camera systems before landing where I am now, and this is the story of how I got there: what each camera taught me, and why I kept moving until I found my sweet spot.
How I Got Here
I spent years photographing weddings on film, starting with 35mm and eventually adding a Pentax 645N to the kit. That was my introduction to medium format, and the jump in image quality stuck with me long after I'd moved on to other work.
For a long time, my primary digital camera was a Canon 1DX Mark II, a fully capable tool. But somewhere along the way I started wondering if Pentax had ever turned the 645N into a digital camera, and that's how I found the Pentax 645Z. The first time I compared its files to my Canon's, I was blown away by the detail and shadow recovery, and that comparison sent me down the rabbit hole that led to everything in this article.
Cambo Actus
Because I was doing architectural photography for clients, I started looking into tilt and shift options for medium format. Pentax didn't offer much in that direction, but I found the Cambo Actus: essentially a scaled down 4x5 view camera built for digital capture. I started with the GFX version. This was my first real technical camera, and it's also when I started learning just how deep this world goes.
Wide lens options for the GFX/Actus combination turned out to be limited, so I converted the Actus to the digital back version and paired it with a Hasselblad CFV II 50C. That turned out to be the single most important thing I learned early on. It comes down to flange distance. The widest lenses built for medium format digital backs have short flange distances, leaving no room to mount them on a mirrorless body, so they can only be used on a digital back. Lenses adapted from other systems, like legacy medium format glass or Canon's tilt-shift lenses, have longer flange distances and do fit, but they weren't designed for this, and none I've used match the purpose-built digital lenses. If you want the widest, best-performing glass Rodenstock and Schneider make, you need a digital back.
The more I used the Actus, the more I ran up against its tolerances. It's a flexible camera with swing, tilt, and bellows extension, and every one of those movements introduces a small margin of error. At the resolution these lenses deliver, small errors are visible. It's a well-documented trait of the camera, not just my experience with mine. The movements that make it versatile are the same ones that make it hard to keep in perfect alignment. For the precision I was after, I wanted something more rigid.
The widest Rodenstock lenses I used, the 23HR and 32HR, were superb, but I also ran into their retrofocal distortion along the way, which is not subtle. That's fine for landscapes, but my focus was architecture, where that kind of distortion is a problem. Between wanting more rigidity and wanting lenses that stayed clean geometrically, I ended up moving to the Cambo WRS 1600 and to Schneider's symmetrical Apo-Digitar lenses.
Cambo WRS 1600
The WRS 1600 is a flat "pancake" technical camera: just a frame between the digital back and the lens, no bellows, no swing or tilt mechanism built into the body itself. After my experience with the Actus, that rigidity was exactly what I was looking for.
Over a few years, I put together a serious Schneider lineup for this camera: the 28XL, 35XL, 43XL, 60XL, 90N, 120ASPH, and 180T, several of them among the most sought-after lenses ever made for the system. It took time and patience to track some of them down, and by the end I thought I'd assembled the ultimate kit. I'd learn later that it was more complicated than that.
Partway through, I upgraded the digital back from the CFV II 50C to a Phase One IQ4 150. The resolution and larger sensor were part of it, but the real reason was the back-side-illuminated sensor. A BSI sensor dramatically reduces the color cast and vignetting you get with symmetrical wide angle lenses, and since I'd just committed to a Schneider lineup built around exactly those symmetrical designs, that mattered a great deal.
Cambo's closed system came with a catch I hadn't fully appreciated. On the WRS 1600, tilt and swing functionality is built into the lens mount itself, not the camera body, so adding that capability to a given lens means sending it to Cambo to have it mounted, at $2,500 per lens. Even a standard mount without tilt or swing runs about $1,500. Those costs added up, and they turned out to be only the start of my friction with Cambo's mounting system.
The bigger problem was quality control. Cambo makes good equipment, and I don't want this to read as a blanket warning about the brand, but I ran into a couple of issues that stuck with me. When I sent in my 120 ASPH to be mounted, it came back unable to reach infinity focus. I sent it back, and it came back the same way a second time. Rather than ship it to the Netherlands a third time and lose another month of use, Cambo sent me instructions to adjust the flange distance myself, which worked, though I lost some close-focus range in getting it close enough to the sensor for infinity focus.
I sent the 180T in for mounting around the same time, and it came back with a flare problem traced to how Cambo had painted the inside of the extension tube, glossy enough that I could actually see the sheen of it inside the barrel. Lining the tube with flock material confirmed the cause and fixed it. I sent the lens back for a repaint, and the flare improved but never fully went away, so I kept flock in that tube for as long as I owned the lens. Between the two issues, I started thinking seriously about mounting lenses myself rather than depending on a manufacturer's proprietary, closed process. That idea eventually became the DIY system I carried into my next camera, and it's one of the reasons I moved to Arca Swiss in the first place.
None of that was enough on its own to make me switch systems. By this point I'd already been relying on my GFX system for interior architectural work, where I use portable strobes. Syncing to strobes is straightforward on a mirrorless body with its own internal shutter, and far more finicky on a technical camera, where it depends on the lens's Copal shutter. For strobe work, the GFX was simply the more practical tool.
Out of curiosity, I started bringing both cameras on landscape trips to see whether I could actually tell the GFX and the WRS 1600 apart in the final results. Honestly, I couldn't, not in any way that mattered. Around that same time, I got an offer on my full Schneider kit that I couldn't pass up, some genuinely hard-to-find lenses I'd spent a long time collecting, and I sold the entire setup.
A Moment of Doubt
For a while after the sale, I wondered if I'd made a mistake. I had a capable camera in the GFX, the files were excellent, and I could tell myself I'd simplified. But something kept nagging at me, and it took a little while to name it. It wasn't the image quality I missed, the GFX had that covered. It was the process.
Shooting a technical camera is a different kind of photography. It's slower and more deliberate. You're setting movements by hand, checking alignment, thinking through the shot in a way a modern mirrorless camera lets you skip. It asks more of you, and when everything comes together, the result is deeply satisfying in a way that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it. That, more than any spec, is what I'd been missing. And realizing how much I missed it was how I knew selling everything hadn't been a mistake at all. I just wasn't done.
Arca Swiss Rm3di
When I sold the Schneider lenses, I sold the Phase One back and the WRS 1600 along with them. I had a feeling I'd be back, and there were rumors of a 100MP Hasselblad back on the horizon, the logical next step for them, so I was fairly confident it was coming. It worked out well for me on the sale, and I was willing to bet on the rebuild.
About three months later, Hasselblad released the CFV 100C with its 100MP BSI sensor, and I started putting a new kit together. This time I went with Hasselblad rather than another Phase One back, for a few reasons. The Hasselblad is smaller and lighter, the price difference was significant, and 100 megapixels is plenty for what I do.
There's also a lens argument that's easy to miss. The Hasselblad's sensor is smaller than the Phase One's, which changes which lenses you actually need. The 35XL on the Hasselblad covers roughly the same effective focal length as the 43XL on the Phase One; the 100N on the Hasselblad is close to the 120ASPH on the Phase One. In every case the Hasselblad-appropriate lens is the more affordable and far easier to find. In my own testing the pairs perform very similarly, in sharpness, in how much they shift before color cast and vignetting set in, in corner performance. So on the smaller sensor, the expensive lens wasn't giving me any real performance gain I could put to use.
That said, your mileage may vary. Some people want the top-of-the-line lenses regardless, and there's nothing wrong with that. My point isn't that the expensive lenses are bad, it's that whether they're worth it depends entirely on the camera you put them on and the way you shoot. I'll come back to that idea at the end.
Given my experience with Cambo's mounting costs and quality control, I looked at Arca Swiss for the body. I also considered Alpa, which is well regarded, but it has many of the same lens-mounting hurdles as Cambo.
The Rm3di's helical has tilt and swing built in, so there's no per-lens premium to add that capability the way there was with Cambo. I also liked the haptics of its other adjustments. The helical gives about 10mm of travel, and the lens boards are standard Copal boards, just built for Arca Swiss's proprietary R-mount. Those two details together got me thinking. Standard boards and a bit of focusing travel to play with meant that, at least in principle, mounting a lens myself might be feasible.
The catch was getting the parts to do it. Arca Swiss won't sell you a spare board outright; they want the lens sent in for "calibration." I found a couple of extra boards on the used market, but that only went so far, and after the mounting headaches I'd already had with Cambo, I wanted to be able to handle this myself. The 10mm of helical travel was what made it possible. It gave me margin to work with, room the WRS 1600's mount didn't allow. With that margin I built my own M65 extension tube adapters and mounted lenses 90mm and longer myself. Anything shorter still had to go through Arca's calibration process, but for most of my kit, I was finally free of it.
Arca Swiss Pico
I had the Rm3di for about a year and a half before Arca Swiss released the Pico, and it's the camera that ties this whole story together. Flat "pancake" cameras like the WRS 1600 are known for their trueness. With so few moving parts, there's very little to fall out of alignment. Bellows cameras like the Actus give you far more flexibility, but as I'd learned, that flexibility comes at the cost of precision. The Pico's promise was to close that gap: the rigid, precise alignment of a flat camera combined with the full movements and compact size of a small view camera. I'd always preferred the way the Actus worked over the flat cameras. I just couldn't live with its tolerances. The Pico looked like it might finally give me both. I sold the Rm3di, bought the Pico, and converted my existing lenses over to its boards.
I've had it about a year and a half now, and it delivers on that promise. It's compact, has full view camera movements (rise, fall, shift, tilt, swing), and it holds alignment in a way the Actus never could. I'll add that I'd come to suspect the tilt and swing mechanics on my Rm3di had drifted slightly out of true. I never tested it precisely enough to be certain, but comparing images from the Rm3di against the Pico left me with that impression. The Pico simply doesn't leave room for that kind of doubt.
The Pico also quietly resolved the mounting friction that had followed me from Cambo through the Rm3di. Arca sells Pico boards on their own, at a fraction of what the Rm3di's calibration tubes cost, and with no forced calibration to go through. For the first time I could put any lens I was curious about on the camera and just try it. After years of mounts that cost more than some of the lenses and processes that kept me from experimenting, that freedom mattered more than I expected.
As an added bonus, I can pair the Pico with a mirrorless body for the flash-based interior work that needs a camera with an internal shutter. That solves the Copal shutter problem and lets me use flash freely, without giving up the technical camera for the architectural and interiors work where it really shines.
I also still use the DIY adapters I built on the Rm3di. The Pico ships with a longer rail that extends its reach, but I don't like using it. Swapping the rail in the field is a hassle, and the longer rail makes the camera too big to fit in my backpack. My adapters avoid both problems, and they reach further than the rail can. On its own, the Pico tops out around a 138mm Rodenstock or 120mm Schneider; with my adapters I can go all the way to a 180mm Rodenstock or Schneider, or even a 200mm Nikkor. Interestingly, Arca Swiss is now developing official extensions for the Pico that aren't far off from what I put together myself.
Where I Landed
Four cameras, and a lot of lessons learned. If there's one idea I'd pull out of the whole journey, it's this: put your attention on fit, not hype. The right gear depends on how the pieces work together for your photography, not on which piece is most expensive or most talked about.
The lenses are the clearest example. A lot of the most coveted glass in this world, the Schneider "unicorns" people hunt for, are out of production now and only turn up on the used market. Two things drive that demand. The first is image circle. The more a camera can shift, the larger the image circle it needs to cover that movement, and big shift cameras created the demand for those large-circle lenses. Cameras vary a lot here. My Pico shifts 18mm in every direction; something like an Alpa Pano shifts 35mm left and right. On a camera with that much movement, the largest image circles genuinely are a must-have. On the Pico they aren't. When I use the 100N I can already max out the camera's shift, so a rarer lens with an even larger circle would give me nothing I could reach.
The second is lens design. Most of Rodenstock's wider lenses are retrofocus designs, which introduce distortion that has to be corrected if you're shooting anything with straight lines, which architecture is almost entirely. Schneider's symmetrical designs give you clean geometry straight out of the camera. The distortion can be corrected, but it means recording your movements and processing through specific software, or investing in expensive specialized gear to do it automatically. If none of that fits how you work, a lens that's clean out of the camera is worth a great deal, and for that you're pushed toward the scarce Schneiders.
None of that means the expensive or hard-to-find lenses are a trap. It means they're worth it when they match your camera and your work, and not worth chasing when they don't. My own kit makes the point. I carry two wide lenses of nearly the same focal length, a Schneider 35XL and a Rodenstock 40HR-W, which looks redundant until you consider their distinct roles. The 35XL has a usable image circle of only about 75mm, but its symmetrical design gives me clean geometry with no correction step, which is exactly what I want for architecture. The 40HR-W has a larger usable circle of around 90mm and a bit of distortion, which doesn't matter for the landscape work I use it for, where the extra coverage does. Two wides at nearly the same focal length, but each there for a different reason. That's fit over hype in miniature.
All of this is to say, take your time to think through your actual use case instead of chasing the hype, though that's easier said than done with technical cameras. There's no shortage of resources for full-frame or even mainstream medium format, but this corner of photography is different. The information exists, but it's scattered across thousands of threads on multiple photography forums, with no reliable way to retrieve it and no easy way for a newcomer to separate the solid advice from the hype. It took me four cameras and several years to piece my own version together. If sharing that path saves someone else a little of that time, this article did its job.
But I'll be honest about the part that keeps me here, because it isn't the gear. It's the reason I couldn't stay away after selling everything, and the reason I've kept at this through four systems and every frustration along the way. There's something about the process itself, the slowing down, the deliberateness, the feeling when a difficult shot finally comes together, that I haven't found anywhere else in photography. The equipment is just how you get to that. If you go down this road, expect it to cost you time, money, and patience. For the right kind of photographer, it's worth every bit of it.