C41
Kodak Portra 400
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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The Mamiya CWP (~1989) is a 35mm SLR using the Mamiya CS bayonet mount, produced in the final years of Mamiya's consumer 35mm SLR line. It offers program, aperture-priority, and full manual exposure modes with a multi-segment metering system - capabilities that reflected contemporary professional-grade SLRs of the mid-1980s but arrived late, when the market was already moving decisively toward autofocus systems. The CWP is a manual-focus camera with no autofocus mechanism; it represents Mamiya's attempt to modernize the CS-mount line's feature set without committing to the engineering cost of an AF system. The result is a capable, underexposed camera that sold in modest quantities and is now rare on the secondhand market.
Reference
Recommended film stocks for the 35mm format your camera takes.
C41
Kodak Portra 400 is a professional C-41 color negative film known for flexible exposure latitude, natural skin tones, and fine grain.
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Kodak Tri-X 400 is a classic black-and-white film known for strong tonality, visible grain, and documentary character.
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Kodak Gold 200 is a daylight-balanced C-41 color negative film with warm color, moderate grain, and a classic consumer-film look.
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Before you buy used
About this camera
Mamiya's last significant CS-mount manual-focus SLR - a program-era body that arrived as autofocus was taking over the market.
| Field | Value |
|---|
| Format | 35mm (135 film) |
| Mount | Mamiya CS |
| Year introduced | ~1989 |
| Shutter | 2s – 1/2000s + B, electronically controlled vertical metal |
| Flash sync | 1/100s |
| Meter | TTL SPD multi-segment |
| Modes | Program, Aperture-priority, Manual |
| Finder | Pentaprism, split-prism / microprism / matte |
| DX coding | Yes |
| Self-timer | Yes, electronic |
Mamiya's consumer 35mm SLR line began with the ZE series (1979) and ran through the ZE-X, ZM Quartz, ZF, and related models across the early-to-mid 1980s, all sharing the CS mount. By 1985, Canon's EOS system and Minolta's Maxxum/Dynax series had demonstrated that autofocus was not a niche feature but the direction of the entire consumer SLR market. Mamiya, whose strategic priority had shifted heavily toward medium format by this period, did not develop an AF SLR in response.
The CWP appears to be one of the last cameras produced under the CS-mount line, ca. 1989, offering a higher-spec feature set - 1/2000s top speed, multi-segment metering - than earlier CS-mount bodies, but without autofocus. By this point, Mamiya's 35mm consumer sales were marginal; the company's energy was directed toward the 645 AF (which would ship in 1999 as the first AF medium-format SLR) and the RZ67 professional system. The CWP was not widely distributed outside Japan.
The CWP is historically notable as an AF-precursor in spirit: it incorporated the metering sophistication (multi-segment, sometimes called evaluative or matrix metering in contemporary marketing language) that was designed to underpin autofocus systems' subject-tracking exposure logic, but applied it to a manual-focus body. This made the CWP arguably overspecified for a manual camera at its price point, and underspecified for photographers who wanted the full AF package.
For collectors, the CWP is one of the rarer CS-mount bodies - less common on the secondhand market than the ZE-X or ZM Quartz - and represents the terminal point of Mamiya's consumer 35mm SLR investment. The CS-mount lens catalog is small but includes optically competent primes (50mm f/1.7, 85mm f/2, 135mm f/2.8) that work normally on the CWP. For photographers interested in a complete Mamiya CS-mount system, the CWP offers the most modern feature set in the lineage.
Mamiya CS mount. Key Sekor CS lenses compatible with the CWP: 28mm f/2.8, 35mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.7 (fast standard), 50mm f/2, 85mm f/2, 135mm f/2.8, 200mm f/3.5. Zooms: 35-70mm f/3.5, 70-210mm f/4.5. The CS mount uses a bayonet with AE coupling contacts; the CWP's multi-segment meter requires compatible CS-mount lenses to function in program and aperture-priority modes.
Third-party CS-mount lenses were produced in limited quantities by Tokina and Sigma. The mount cannot be adapted to Canon EF, Nikon F, or other common mounts without custom machining.
BW
Ilford HP5 Plus is a flexible ISO 400 black-and-white film with classic grain and strong push-processing tolerance.
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Kodak Ektar 100 is a fine-grain C-41 color negative film with saturated color and high sharpness.
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