Canon EOS 650

This is the camera that ended the FD mount. When Canon shipped the EOS 650 in March 1987, on the company's fiftieth anniversary, they did not extend their existing system. They threw it away. Every Canon lens made before that day stopped fitting the new bodies, and decades later you are still buying EF glass because of the bet Canon placed here. The 650 is the first EOS, the start of the whole line, and you can feel that it is a first draft.

The defining choice was putting the autofocus motor in the lens instead of the body. Nikon, Minolta, everyone else was cramming a screwdriver motor into the camera and spinning the lens from there. Canon ran electrical contacts to the mount and let each lens drive itself, which is why the EF system aged so well and why a 1987 body will autofocus a lens designed last year. The AF uses Canon's BASIS sensor and it is genuinely quick for the era, a single center point that snaps in good light and hunts a little when the contrast drops. The launch lineup paired it with the EF 50mm f/1.8, a cheap fast normal that is still a fine first lens. The famous 50mm f/1.0L, the fastest autofocus lens anyone has built, came later, in 1989, once the system had room to show off.

In the hand it is light, a bit hollow, very much an early plastic SLR. The viewfinder is clean and bright with a plain matte screen, no split prism because the camera does the focusing for you now. The shutter runs from 30 seconds to about 1/2000 with flash sync near 1/125, and it sounds exactly like late-eighties electronics, a flat clack with a motor whir on the wind. Loading is automatic, drop the leader to the mark and the back pulls it across. There is one control dial and a small set of program modes, including a green full-auto box that made the camera popular with people stepping up from a point and shoot.

The meter is more sophisticated than the price suggests. It is a six-zone evaluative system, one of the first evaluative systems Canon put in an autofocus body, and a 6.5 percent partial mode sits behind it for when you want to read a specific patch. In flat or even light it nails exposure on its own. The catch is that early evaluative metering still gets fooled by strong backlight or a big bright field, a snow bank or a window behind the subject, and it will pull your shadows down trying to protect the highlights it sees. The fix is to meter the part you care about. Switch to partial mode, or take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows on the zone you actually want, and set that on the body rather than letting the pattern average over the whole frame.

The real weakness is age. These bodies are pushing forty now and the electronics are not serviceable in any practical sense. When the shutter or the AF circuit dies, it is done, and the rubber grip often turns to glue first. That is also why it is cheap. The 650 sells for less than almost any other EOS film body because it is the oldest and the plainest, and people who want the same guts in a tougher shell reach for an Elan or an EOS 3. But it is the cleanest way into a giant lens system on the budget end, and for a beginner who wants real autofocus and a roll of film, nothing else costs this little.