Canon Canonflex RP

Frame a portrait, swap from a normal lens to a long one, and watch the bokeh fall off behind the eyes the way a rangefinder never quite lets you see. That is the trade the Canonflex RP makes. In 1960 Canon was still a rangefinder company at heart, and the SLR was the new bet: you compose through the taking lens, so the framing on the glass is the framing on the film. No parallax, no guessing on a close subject. For tight portraits and anything longer than 50mm, the reflex finder wins, and the leaf-shutter fixed-lens cameras of that year cannot follow.

The RP was the simplified, cheaper sibling in the early Canonflex line, and you feel the cost-cutting both ways. The pentaprism is fixed rather than removable, which is fine for most people and one less thing to lose. The finder is a ground-glass screen, bright enough in daylight and a little soft for critical focus in dim rooms. The body is dense, all metal, cold in the hand on a winter morning. The focal-plane shutter runs from a full second up to about 1/1000, slow speeds and top speed both there if you respect the camera's age and have the curtains checked.

This is the Canon R mount, the breech-lock bayonet Canon used before the FL and then the FD lenses arrived. R glass is the catch. There was never much of it, the lenses are getting scarce and pricey, and while a later FL or FD lens will physically thread onto the breech-lock, it loses its automatic diaphragm and any metering coupling. People who buy an RP are buying into a small, closed family of optics, and they know it going in.

There is no meter inside the body. Nothing to read off the finder, no needle to match, no cell to worry about, so you meter off the camera entirely. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, transferred to the shutter dial and the aperture ring, is the cleanest way to place your shadows and trust the result. It is the meter this body was built without, and working that way sidesteps the whole question of aging selenium.

The honest weakness is exactly that lens scarcity, paired with a system Canon abandoned fast. The R mount was a dead end inside a few years, so the RP is an evolutionary footnote, not a workhorse you can grow into. Servicing is specialist work and parts are thin.

Who shoots one today: collectors, and people who like owning a camera from the years Canon was changing direction. It gets cross-shopped against the Nikon F, which won that fight decisively and has the lenses to prove it. Buy the RP for the history and the heft, not because you need a daily camera. On those terms it delivers, and it still takes a sharp frame when you feed it good R glass and a careful reading.