Canon AV-1

You are walking down a market street and the light is changing every fifteen feet, sun then awning then sun. You want to pick your aperture, get the depth of field you want, and let the camera chase the shutter speed. That is the whole reason the AV-1 exists, and for anyone who thinks in depth of field first, it gets out of the way better than its famous sibling. The AE-1 makes you set the shutter and trust it for the aperture, which is backwards if your eye starts with how much you want in focus. The AV-1 flips it. You twist the aperture ring, frame, and shoot.

Canon built it in 1979 because the American distributors were tired of explaining why every Nikkormat and Pentax buyer wanted aperture priority and Canon's A-series only offered shutter priority. So this is an AE-1 with the logic reversed, same FD mount, the same kind of CPU-controlled exposure brain, a broadly similar feel in the hand. The trick worth knowing is the shutter. It is stepless, so instead of snapping to 1/60 or 1/30 it can sit between the marks and nail the exposure. The finder shows a traditional match needle riding a shutter-speed scale, and you watch it climb and fall as you open and close the lens. Split-image center, microprism collar, bright enough fixed pentaprism. It focuses fast and it reads clean.

It runs the same A-series shutter mechanism, so it tops out near 1/1000 with flash sync at 1/60, and you get a full two seconds on the slow end for tripod work at dusk. The body is light, mostly because there is a lot of plastic under the covering, and people who hand you one for the first time always say it feels cheaper than an AE-1. It does not. The internals are nearly identical. What it gives up is control, and this is the honest weakness: there is no manual mode at all. None. The camera picks the shutter speed and you cannot dial it yourself. Your only overrides are the ASA dial, which you can shift to bias the whole exposure by a known amount, and a fixed backlight button by the lens mount that adds about a stop and a half when you press it. For a learner that is freedom. For anyone who wants to set both dials by hand, it is a wall.

The meter is center-weighted averaging off a silicon photocell (SPC), and like every averaging meter it gets fooled by backlight and snow and a bright sky over a dark street. It will expose for the average and let your subject go to shadow. When the scene is contrasty, take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows where you want them, then bias the camera to that exposure by resetting the ASA dial, since the dial is the only continuous override the body gives you. The backlight button is fine when a stop and a half happens to be the right amount, but the ASA dial is how you hit an exact value. It is the difference between a printable negative and a guess.

Today the AV-1 is the cheap way into the Canon FD system, and it is cheap because the AE-1 hype machine pulled all the attention and price up with it. People cross-shop the two constantly. If you want manual control, buy the AE-1 or an A-1. If you think in apertures and want a light, quick, dependable street body for not much money, this is the smarter buy, and the dollar you save goes straight into a 50mm f/1.4. One caveat the bargain price hides: it is fully battery dependent. Dead cell, dead camera. Carry a spare 4LR44.