Canon Canonflex

Reach under the front of a Canonflex and you find a winding crank nobody else thought to put there. It folds out of the bottom plate and lets you advance film with your left hand while your right stays on the shutter button. Canon called this trigger-wind clever, and for a posed tripod portrait it sort of is. Hold the camera like a normal SLR and it fights every reflex you own. This is Canon's first 35mm SLR, and you can read the company still learning the format in every odd choice the body makes.

The build is heavy and tight, the kind of all-metal density that explains why so many survive sixty-odd years on. There is no meter. This came from the moment just before a CdS cell in the prism was assumed, so you set the dial from 1 second up to about 1/1000 by hand off a separate reading. The focal-plane shutter is cloth and the action firm. Flash sync sits low, as it does on every cloth focal-plane shutter of the period, so leaf-shutter studio strobe work was never this camera's job.

The finder is a fixed eye-level pentaprism. It was respectable for 1959 and it is dim by any modern habit. You focus on plain ground glass, and on a fast R-mount lens wide open it snaps in cleanly. Stop down and the screen goes murky, the standard tax of an early SLR.

What really dates the Canonflex is the mount. This is the original Canon R breech-lock bayonet, the ancestor of FL and FD, and the lenses are scarce and heavy, the sort of glass collectors hunt for. The standard Super-Canomatic R normal lens that shipped on the front is a genuinely good optic. But the R system was short-lived. Canon pivoted to FL fast, and that is why a Canonflex today is more shelf piece than shooter for most people. It existed to prove Canon could build an SLR at all, and within a year the company had moved past it.

Be clear-eyed about the downsides. No meter, an orphaned mount, and that bottom-plate crank that argues with your muscle memory. Light seals are dead on most surviving bodies, and a proper CLA on something this rare runs steep. People cross-shop it against the Nikon F from the same moment, and the Nikon wins on every practical axis except rarity. You buy a Canonflex because it is the start of a lineage, not because it is the best tool on the bench.

Since there was never a cell to trust, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is simply how you expose this body. Place your shadows where you want them, set the aperture and that 1-to-1/1000 dial by hand, and shoot. The meter the Canonflex always lacked now rides in your pocket.