Canon EF

Most FD bodies give you that soft cloth-shutter whisper. The EF does not. It has a vertical metal Copal Square shutter, and it lands with a flat metallic clack that sounds more like a Nikkormat than a Canon. That sound is the first clue that this body is the odd one out in the FD lineup, and the reasons it earns that reputation only stack up the longer you shoot it.

Here is the trick that made it. The fast speeds, roughly 1/2 up to about 1/1000, are mechanically timed and run with no battery at all. The slow speeds, the long end of the dial down to a full 30 seconds, are electronically governed and need the cell. So you get a camera that keeps shooting handheld in any weather even when the silver oxide dies, and that also opens up genuinely long timed exposures on a tripod, which almost nothing else from this era does without a bulb and a stopwatch. Flash sync sits at 1/120, the natural sync speed of a metal vertical shutter, a touch faster than the 1/60 most cloth-shutter Canons gave you.

The meter is the other reason people hunt these down. Canon put a silicon photocell in the EF instead of the CdS cells everyone else was still using, so it reacts instantly and does not lag or get blinded coming out of a bright scene. It is center-weighted and runs shutter-priority autoexposure: you pick the shutter speed, a needle in the finder shows you the aperture it wants, and you can watch the meter follow the light in real time. The viewfinder is bright, big, and uncluttered, with a microprism collar around a central split-prism that snaps focus fast. Build quality is dense and serious. This is a heavy camera, brass and steel, and it feels like it.

Who shot it then was the advanced amateur who wanted automation without going to the cheaper, plasticky direction Canon took three years later with the AE-1. Who shoots it now is the person who has handled a dozen FD bodies and wants the long exposures, the silicon meter, and that vertical-shutter sync. It is the FD body for people who already know the rest of the lineup, and the ones who chase it can tell you in one sentence exactly why.

The honest weakness is the autoexposure circuit. A built-in voltage regulator means the meter still reads true on modern 1.5V cells, so the battery is not your problem, but the long-exposure electronics are: capacitors and the slow-speed timing can drift after fifty years, and a dead long end is a common fault on neglected examples. A proper CLA is not cheap, and a botched one is worse. Buy from someone who has actually run the slow speeds.

The aging circuit is also why a handheld reading still matters here. The body's center-weighted needle will hunt and average on a hard backlit or high-contrast scene, so read it with the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you want, and dial the shutter in shutter-priority from there instead of trusting the average. Today it cross-shops against the AE-1 and the FTb, usually a bit pricier than either, and the people paying that premium are paying for the shutter and the meter, not the badge.