Canon EOS 1000

Put a Canon EOS 1000 next to the Minolta Dynax 3000i it was fighting in the camera shops of 1990 and the Canon wins on one thing that mattered then and matters now: the lens mount. Both were cheap autofocus bodies aimed at the person upgrading from a point-and-shoot. But the EOS 1000 wears a Canon EF mount, which means every modern Canon autofocus lens, including the ones people bolt onto digital bodies today, fits and works. The Minolta locked you into a system that mostly died. That single decision is why these things still sell for the price of a sandwich and the Minolta gets ignored.

It is a plastic camera and it does not pretend otherwise. Light, hollow, the kind of body that creaks if you squeeze it. The shutter is electronically timed, focal-plane, running from 30 seconds down to about 1/1000, with flash sync up near 1/90. Press the button and you get a thin polite clack, nothing like the slap of a metal-bodied SLR. Autofocus is a single center point driven by Canon's then-new system, fast in daylight, hunting and giving up in a dim restaurant. The finder is a fixed eye-level type, reasonably bright for a budget body, with a focus confirmation dot at the bottom instead of any split prism. There is no manual focusing aid worth the name because nobody buying this in 1990 was going to focus by hand.

The meter defaults to Canon's three-zone evaluative pattern, the matrix-style system that reads the frame in segments and feeds the green-rectangle program mode that picks aperture and shutter for you. There is also a partial mode that reads about the center 9.5 percent of the frame, and a center-weighted average you can only reach in manual exposure. It is fine for snapshots and lousy the moment the scene fights it. Backlight a person and the EOS 1000 reads the bright background and leaves the face in mud. This is where the body shows its budget roots, because there is no easy way to argue with it in the heat of the moment. The fix is to read the scene yourself: take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, decide where you want the shadows to fall, then dial that into the camera's manual or partial-metering mode instead of trusting the green box.

Who shoots one now? People who already own EF glass and want a film body for the cost of nothing. Students. Anyone curious about film who refuses to spend real money to find out if they like it. It loads film the modern way, drop the cassette in, pull the leader to a mark, close the back and the motor does the rest, which removes one of the classic beginner failures.

The honest weakness is the whole thing, frankly. The build feels disposable, the autofocus is one generation behind useful, and the electronics have no manual fallback when the battery dies, which on a body this age it eventually will. There is no romance here and no metal. But it meters acceptably, it fires reliably while it lives, and it turns a shelf of EF lenses into a film camera for almost no outlay. As a first roll of film, you could do far worse, and most of the alternatives at this price cost you a lens mount you actually want.