Mamiya Sekor Super 180mm f/4.5 (C TLR)

This is the portrait lens of the only interchangeable-lens TLR ever built in volume, and on a 6x6 frame the 180mm acts roughly like a short tele on 35mm: long enough to flatten a face, short enough that you can still hand-hold the rig if your arms cooperate. The 80mm normal is the workhorse of the whole C line, and this 180 is the long portrait option that earns the second body for anyone shooting heads and shoulders.

Stopped down to f/8 or f/11 it is sharp across the 6x6 negative, with the high micro-contrast that coated Mamiya glass of this era tends to have. Wide open at f/4.5 it softens at the edges while the center stays usable, which is the right behavior for a head-and-shoulders frame where you want the corners to fall away anyway. Out-of-focus rendering is calm and rounded, not nervous, and there is no swirl or cat-eye drama. It draws backgrounds the way a working studio lens should: quietly. Flare control is decent for a 1978-to-1994 design, but it is not a modern multicoated optic, so a contre-jour source will lift the shadows. Use the hood.

The defining quirk of the whole C system is bellows focusing instead of a helicoid, and it changes how you shoot the 180. Rack it close and the lens extends on rails, which means real extension and real light loss at portrait distances. This is the one metering habit to build: at close focus you are losing light to bellows extension, and Zone Light Meter will compute the bellows factor from your extension so your incident or spot reading actually lands. The bodies print a rough compensation scale on the side, but a measured factor beats eyeballing a paint mark. The leaf shutter is the other gift here, syncing flash at every speed up to its top mark, so fill flash in daylight is trivial in a way no focal-plane medium format body can match.

Speed and bulk are the price. f/4.5 is slow, and on a long lens that means a dim, squinty waist-level image when the light drops, plus the parallax you correct with the Paramender or read off the finder's moving mark up close. The C330 and its 180 together are a heavy, deliberate kit. This is not a run-and-gun lens.

The C-system 180 is cheap relative to a Rolleiflex tele or a Hasselblad 180, and it remains the budget path into long medium-format portraiture with leaf-shutter sync. The black Super version is the one to chase over the older chrome optics for the better coatings. People who want a Mamiya RB 180 for the bigger 6x7 negative skip it; people who already shoot a C body and want reach without a second system keep it for life.