Canon Canonflex RM

Pick one up at a swap meet and the first thing you notice is the weight. The Canonflex RM is a slab of early-sixties brass and steel, cold in the hand, the kind of body that feels built to take a beating and never give one back. Canon made it in 1962, the last of the Canonflex line, the company still finding its footing in the SLR business after years of building rangefinders aimed at Leica. The R that closes out the line tried to fix the parts buyers complained about, and the headline fix sat right on the front.

That little selenium cell on the prism housing is the whole reason the RM exists. The earlier Canonflex bodies made you guess or clip on an accessory meter. The RM built one in and coupled it to the shutter speed dial, so you set your speed, read the needle in the window on the top plate, and turn the aperture ring until the needle lines up. Match the needle, shoot. No battery anywhere in the camera, because selenium makes its own current off the light. The catch is age. Sixty years in, most of these cells have faded or quit entirely, and an RM that still meters close to correct is rare enough that you should treat a live one as a happy accident. If yours reads dead or wanders, don't chase it. An incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app gives you back the meter the body has lost, and you set the dials by hand exactly as the original owner did.

The finder is reasonably bright for the era, with a central focusing aid that snaps in on a fast lens and goes soft once the light drops. The shutter is a focal-plane unit running from a full second to about 1/1000, all mechanical, with the soft clunk of a camera built before electronics got involved. Nothing in here needs power to fire a frame.

The reason collectors care is the mount. This is a Canon R body, the company's first SLR lens system, the ancestor of the FL and then the FD glass that made Canon's name. R lenses live in their own small world, with an external breech-lock ring and an odd aperture coupling, and they won't mount on anything newer without machining. Buying a Canonflex RM means buying into a dead mount with a thin lens list. The glass that exists tends to be sharp and is getting expensive, and a body with a sticky slow-speed escapement needs a CLA from someone who actually knows the R series, which is a shrinking pool.

So who actually loads one. Mostly Canon historians and people who want to hold the company's first real SLR rather than shoot it day to day. Call it a shelf piece you can still feed a roll of HP5 on a quiet Sunday and run it through for the feel of it. If you want a system that survived, cross-shop an early Nikon F. If you want the same brand with glass you can buy without a hunt, look at a Canon FT instead.