Canon EOS 620

The shoot is a downtown loft, a designer pacing while an assistant gels a window, and the camera on the tripod is a black plastic brick from 1987 with a green LCD glowing on top. The photographer thumbs the rear command dial, the aperture clicks down a third of a stop, and the shutter fires at 1/250 with a sharp electronic snap. That sync speed is the tell. Most consumer SLRs of the era topped flash sync near 1/125, and the EOS 620 ran it to 1/250 with a shutter that climbs to about 1/4000, which is why it landed in working bags and not just on hobbyist shelves.

This was Canon burning the bridge to its old mount. The FD lenses, the mechanical A-1 and AE-1 that a generation of students had carried, all of it got left behind in 1987 when Canon committed to EF, the all-electronic mount with the focus motor living inside every lens. The EOS 650 came first as the entry point. The 620 arrived right alongside it as the upmarket sibling: faster shutter, faster sync, and a multiple-exposure mode (up to nine frames) plus a backlit top LCD the 650 did without. Mount any EF lens you own for a digital Canon and it fires here, three decades back, no adapter.

Through the finder it is a fixed pentaprism, bright enough, with the shutter speed and aperture stacked along the bottom and the focus confirmation light blinking in the corner. The meter is an early evaluative pattern, six zones reading the scene and making a smart guess, with a partial reading over the center for when you do not trust that guess. Good for 1987, merely fine by modern standards. Program mode runs the whole show, aperture priority lets you set the f-stop and chase depth of field, and the body fills in the rest off a single 2CR5 lithium cell.

That battery is the honest weakness, and it comes in two flavors. The obvious one is total dependence; no cell, no camera, and there is no mechanical backup speed to limp home on. The quieter one is specific to this body and the 650. The shutters use a foam-and-rubber bumper that ages into sticky tar, and a gummed-up EOS 620 fires erratically or not at all until someone scrapes the residue out. A tested, exercised copy is the only one worth buying, and a CLA on a camera this cheap rarely pencils out.

Where it earns the app is contrast. That six-zone meter, clever as it was for its day, still wants to average a backlit subject or a hard studio key into gray mud. For a tricky high-contrast scene, take a spot or incident reading off the shadow you care about with Zone Light Meter, place it on the zone you actually want, and set that in manual or on the compensation dial instead of trusting the body to average it. Today the 620 is one of the cheapest doors into the EF system, cross-shopped against the 650 and the later Rebels, and it wins on that faster shutter and sync. Buy one firing clean. It is more camera than its price suggests, and it was the body that proved Canon's gamble on EF would hold.