Canon EOS 5 / A2 / A2E

You aim this camera by looking at things. That is the headline, the reason it exists, and the only thing most people remember about it. In 1992 Canon shipped a 35mm SLR that picked its focus point from where your eye was pointed inside the finder, and three decades later it is still a party trick that makes people who have never touched film lean in. The A2E got the eye control. The plain A2, the same body without the trick, made you select the five points by thumb. Both were sold in Europe as the EOS 5.

The eye control works by reading reflections off your eyeball, and the honest truth is that it works until it doesn't. You calibrate it to your eye in a menu, indoors, in even light, and on a good day it snaps to the point you are looking at faster than any thumb could move. Then you put on sunglasses, or you tilt the camera to vertical (where it quits and hands the point selection back to your thumb), or you wear glasses with the wrong coating, and it starts choosing the wall behind your subject. Plenty of owners calibrated it once, got frustrated, and shot the rest of the camera's life on plain AF point selection. The camera is genuinely good that way too, which is the point.

The body is mostly polycarbonate over a metal chassis, and it feels like a serious tool without the brick weight of a pro EOS-1. The finder is bright and shows you shutter speed, aperture, the metering pattern, and the active focus points lit in the frame. Loading is automatic, the motor drive runs about five frames a second, and the whole thing is fed by a single 2CR5 lithium cell that lasts. Build reputation is strong; these were bought by working pros and wedding shooters who needed a backup that would not flinch, and a lot of them are still firing.

The meter is the quiet star. Sixteen-zone evaluative tied to the focus points handles ordinary scenes without thinking, but there is also a 3.5% spot reading at the center, plus center-weighted and average. That spot is fixed at the middle of the frame, so you have to point the camera to use it. Just know what it is: a genuinely tight 3.5% patch, but still a small central area of the finder, not a one-degree handheld-meter cone. For a hard backlit portrait, read the shadow you care about with the Zone Light Meter app, place it on the zone you want, and dial that into manual rather than trust the spot to nail a tiny highlight on its own.

The weakness is the one every electronic EOS shares. There is nothing to repair by hand. When the shutter magnets or the eye-control sensor finally drift, the camera is done, and nobody is doing a board-level CLA on a body that sells for the price of a nice dinner. People cross-shop it against the EOS Elan series and the cheaper EOS Rebels, and the A2 wins on the meter, the build, and the finder. Buy one tested firing. It is the most camera you can get for the money in EF film, eye gimmick or not.