Canon EOS 1000FN

Canon built the EOS 1000 line in the early 1990s to put autofocus EOS into the hands of people who could not stretch to an EOS 10 or 100. The 1000FN arrived in 1992 as the second pass at that idea, a lightly tweaked version of the original 1000F. The headline change was the shutter: the FN pushed the top speed up from the 1000F's ceiling, and once you owned one EF lens you were locked into the whole Canon autofocus system. That was the entire reason the camera existed.

In the hand it is very light, and the plastic shows. The body is mostly polycarbonate, the grip is shallow, and there is a faint hollow rattle if you shake it. None of that matters once you look through it. The finder is bright enough, with a fixed focusing screen and a clean readout, and the autofocus is a single-point system that snaps fast in daylight and hunts a little when the light drops. Loading is automatic. Drop the cassette in, pull the leader to the mark, close the back, and the motor threads it for you. The shutter is electronic and vertical-travel, running from a long 30 seconds up to about 1/2000 at the top end, with flash sync near 1/90. It fires with a soft electronic clack.

The metering changes with how you shoot. In the auto and program modes you get a multi-zone evaluative meter, partial metering takes over for close-ups, and manual mode drops you to center-weighted averaging. The evaluative pattern is fine for snapshots and gets fooled by exactly what you would expect: a bright sky behind a face, a stage light, snow. The body wants to average everything toward gray, and in a high-contrast scene it will protect the highlights and bury your subject in shadow.

So for a backlit portrait or a hard-contrast street scene, take a reading off the Zone Light Meter app and place the shadows on the zone you actually want, then dial that exposure in instead of trusting the body to guess. The 1000FN gives you full manual control, so the app's reading goes straight onto the dials.

The honest weakness is power. This is a fully electronic camera with no mechanical backup, so a dead battery is a dead camera, and the original 2CR5 lithium cell is not the cheapest thing on the shelf. The plastic also shows its age. Grip rubber gets tacky over the decades, and on the QD data-back variant the date module's cell can leak if nobody minds it.

Today the 1000FN is the camera people buy for almost nothing to test an EF lens they found at a flea market. It cross-shops against the EOS 1000, the Rebel bodies that followed, and any number of entry Minoltas and Nikons from the same years. Nobody collects it. But it autofocuses, it meters, it takes every EF lens Canon ever made including the modern ones, and it costs less than a roll-and-develop. For a student or a first film body, that is a lot of camera for the money.