Canon EOS 750

Point it at a moving kid in a backyard, half-press, and let it do the rest. In 1988 Canon handed a beginner a body that handled the focus, the wind, and the exposure on its own, and asked only that you frame the shot. Other entry SLRs of the era still made you turn a ring and chase a needle. The 750 locked on and fired.

It came early in the EOS line, and that lineage outweighs anything the camera itself does. The EF mount arrived in 1987, fully electronic, no mechanical linkage between body and lens, and the 750 was Canon's cheap on-ramp into it. The EF lens you bayonet onto a 750 still works on an R5 today via Canon's EF-to-RF adapter. That continuity is why these bodies keep turning up in collections. People buy a $20 750 to test EF glass they already own.

Using it is plain in the way a beginner camera should be. The viewfinder is adequate, not bright, with a centered autofocus bracket and a couple of LEDs along the bottom. No split-prism, no microprism collar, since there is no manual focusing aid to speak of. The shutter is a focal-plane unit running from a long 2 seconds up to about 1/2000, with flash sync in the 1/90s range. The mirror and motor make a flat plasticky clack, nothing you would call refined. Film loads on a motorized takeup; you drop the cartridge in and shut the door. The whole thing is light and hollow.

The meter is centre-weighted average, tied to the program automation, and it is fine for snapshots and openly bad at anything contrasty. Backlight a face and the 750 exposes for the background and lets the face go to mud, the way an averaging meter does. This is the one place to slow down. Take an incident or spot reading off the skin with the Zone Light Meter app, decide which zone you want the shadows to fall on, then set that exposure rather than trusting the body to guess. The camera will happily expose the bright window behind your subject and call it a day.

The honest weakness is that everything hangs on a battery and a circuit board now older than most of its owners. There is no manual fallback. Dead 2CR5 cell means dead camera, and the electronics were never built for a thirty-year service life, so a unit that worked last year can simply stop. Nothing repairs economically. When a 750 quits, it goes in the bin and you buy another for the price of lunch.

Where it sits today is the bottom shelf, and that is the appeal. Nobody cross-shops a 750 against a Leica. They cross-shop it against a Minolta Maxxum or a Nikon F-401, and they buy whichever one came with a lens. As a cheap way into EF autofocus on film, it earns its keep. Just keep a spare battery in the bag and treat any working copy as borrowed time.