Let's start with the stipulation that this won't be a formal review. It won't be a first look, and it won't be a field report.Rather, this is a report about my daily use of the 645z, which I purchased in early August, 2014 and the things that I have discovered while working with it.

In July Ricoh / Pentax Canada provided Nick Devlin and me with a pre-production 645z for a few days so that we could run some tests and write a preliminary review. As these things go, we did a pretty fair job. But I was left dissatisfied with what we had done, mainly because the 645z is such a rich instrument in terms of features and capability. It deserved more.

Let me note that in our review I wrote ..."just a couple of years ago the 645Z would have generated 'want bumps', but now, hardly at all." I actually now regret writing that facile comment, because on reflection, once the review sample 645z had been shipped back to Pentax I realized that in fact the camera pressed a lot of the right b...