Canon AE-1

Saturday morning, a high school photo class, and twenty of the same black-and-chrome body come out of twenty backpacks at once. Through the late '70s and into the '80s this was the camera that taught America to shoot. Canon moved millions of them, and the reason is sitting right under your right thumb: set the aperture ring to the green A, pick a shutter speed, and the camera does the rest. Canon's pitch was that it was so advanced it was simple, and that pitch ran everywhere in 1976, the year of the Montreal Olympics, when you could not open a magazine without seeing one. For once the marketing was telling the truth.

What made it tick was the part you could not see. The AE-1 was built around a microprocessor, which let Canon pour the electronics into a smaller, lighter, partly plastic shell and still sell it cheap. The trade for that cleverness is total battery dependence. The shutter is electromagnetically timed, so when the 4LR44 dies the camera dies with it, all the way down to the release. There is no mechanical backup speed, not even one. A dead cell turns the body into a paperweight, so a spare in the bag is not optional.

Put your eye to the finder and it is bright and businesslike. A split-image wedge sits in the middle, ringed by a collar of microprism, on a fresnel matte field, so focus snaps two ways at once and your eye learns it in an afternoon. Down the right edge a needle rides an aperture scale, telling you what f-stop the meter has chosen in auto. The metering is center-weighted, reading at full aperture through the lens, and it is honest in even light. The shutter runs from a slow two seconds up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60. Then there is the sound. The AE-1 is the camera famous for the cough, a faint squeal on release as the mirror dampers dry out. Most of them squeak by now. Annoying, yes, but usually harmless until the bearing actually wears.

This is where a meter you can trust off the body earns its place. The center-weighted cell leans on the middle of the frame, and that bias gets fooled the moment the scene fights it: a face against a bright sky, a busker lit from one side, snow. Take a spot reading with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to fall on, then dial that exposure in manually instead of letting the needle chase the background. Let the body handle the easy frames in auto and step in by hand when the light gets stubborn.

The honest weakness past the squeal is that it is electronic in an era when electronics were new, and forty-plus-year-old solder joints and light seals do go. A clean one with fresh foam is a joy. A neglected one can read a stop off or lock up cold. People still cross-shop it against the Pentax K1000, the other great student body, and the split goes by temperament: the K1000 is all-mechanical and meter-only, the AE-1 gives you automation but asks for a battery to do it. It anchors the Canon FD mount, which means a deep, cheap shelf of glass behind it, the 50mm f1.8 practically free. Buy one that has been serviced, feed it a battery, and it will keep shooting long after you have stopped being annoyed by the squeak.