Canon EOS 630

Wind the EOS 630 to the next frame and you hear a fast little electric whir, not a thumb-lever ratchet. Canon had walked away from the FD mount a couple of years earlier and committed to a fully electronic lens system, and the 630 is the camera where the EOS idea finally feels finished. The 620 and 650 came first and felt like prototypes. By the time the 630 landed in 1989 the autofocus was quick, the build was solid, and the thing just worked.

Look through the finder and it is bright and uncluttered, with the focus point bracketed in the center and a clean LCD strip along the bottom giving you shutter speed and aperture. There is no split-prism, no microprism collar, because you are not meant to focus this thing by hand. The single-point AF sensor was genuinely good for its era and locks faster than you would expect from a camera this old. Metering is a six-zone evaluative system plus a partial mode reading the center, and the evaluative pattern is smart enough that most slide film comes back properly placed without you thinking about it.

The shutter is a vertical-travel focal-plane unit running from 30 seconds out to about 1/2000, with flash sync near 1/120. Film loads the way every EOS loads, which is to say you drop the cartridge in, pull the leader to a mark, shut the door, and the motor pulls the whole roll out and winds it back into the can as you shoot. Lose count and it stops on its own. The body is polycarbonate over a metal chassis, lighter than the old A-1 it replaced in spirit, and it runs entirely on a 2CR5 lithium cell. No battery, no camera. That is the deal with every electronic SLR and the 630 makes no exception.

Where it bites you is the evaluative meter in deliberately ugly light. Point it at a backlit portrait or a stage washed in one hard spotlight and the averaging logic hedges, lifting the background and letting your subject sink. This is exactly the scene where you stop trusting the body. Take a spot reading off the face with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone the shadows belong on, and dial that exposure in with the body in manual. The 630 gives you full manual control, so the app reading drops straight onto the dial.

The EOS 630 is one of the cheaper ways into a serious 35mm autofocus kit. Every EF lens made since 1987 mounts and autofocuses, including the modern L glass people pay serious money for on digital bodies, so you can build a sharp setup for the price of a fast lens alone. People cross-shop it against the cheaper Rebels and the pricier EOS 1. It is more camera than a plastic Rebel and a fraction of the cost of a pro body, which is most of the appeal. The honest caveat is age. The light seals dry out and the rubber grip can get tacky, both cheap fixes, but check them before you load anything you care about.