I bought the Pentax 645Z on Adorama about 18 days ago. And I took the camera to Vancouver this past weekend to shoot the Seaplanes on the Bay downtown. I have also owned the Pentax 645D. The biggest improvement over the 645D is that the 645Z reads to the card much faster.

I've owned the 645z since February 2015 and my findings are overall very good. As with any high end camera like this, you have to be prepared to do extensive editing to any image for it to look its best. Back in the film days, I was a drum scanner operator at a prepress company.

Let's face it, there aren't many of us out there who can afford to blow £7,699 on a camera and lens, but believe it or not, the 51.4MP Pentax 645Z is an absolute steal at this price.

got to love Pentax the sharpness of the picture taken with the 645z are awesome.

The Pentax 645Z is a medium-format DSLR camera with a 51.4-megapixel CMOS sensor with no low pass filter, offering an imaging area of 43.8mm x 32.8mm which is 1.7x larger than a 35mm full-frame sensor.

"The news about the new 645Z did pop up on the DPReview web site, and avidly read. It was then a matter of patience and obviously time till Henry's Exposure show, where there was a strong chance to get up close and personal with the new kid on the block.

As a dedicated photographer for many years, I have used many different cameras: Nikon F-3, Canon 5Ds, Mamiya RZ67, Hasselblad, Sony A7r and others. But the one camera I truly wanted most was a digital medium format. In stepped Pentax with a now affordable answer.

Usually the preserve of the professional studio photographer, Pentax has been trying to tempt enthusiast photographers with a medium-format digital camera since the launch of the Pentax 645D in March 2010.

51.4-million-pixel CMOS sensor with no AA filter; Excellent value; used manual-focus 645 lenses available; Cheaper than the medium-format competition

Weighs 1,470g; AF could be a little faster

As a medium format camera the Pentax 645Z has a sensor that's considerably bigger than the sensors in full frame cameras such as the Nikon D810 and Canon 5D Mark III . In fact, as it measures 43.8x32.8mm, it's around 1.68x their size.

Until very recently, you had to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to get a new digital medium-format camera, and in some cases you'd spend that much on the camera back alone.