Canon EOS Rebel 2000

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is how little there is to notice. The Rebel 2000 weighs almost nothing, the grip is hollow polycarbonate, and when you trip the shutter you get a flat plasticky clack followed by the little electric whir of the motor pulling the next frame. No heft, no mirror thud you feel in your wrists, no reassuring brass anywhere. It feels like a toy until you put a real EF lens on the front, and then it stops being a toy and starts being a camera that nailed focus before you finished thinking about it.

That was the whole point. Canon sold this thing by the truckload from 1999 onward as the entry door to the EF system, the body you bought with the 28-80 plastic kit zoom because it was cheap and your nephew needed a camera for the trip. Outside North America it wore the EOS 300 badge. It gave a beginner seven autofocus points, a 35-zone evaluative meter that is genuinely good at ordinary daylight, and full program, aperture-priority, shutter-priority, and manual modes in a package that cost less than a single nice lens. Anybody who owns a stack of EF glass today can mount all of it here. The 50mm f/1.8 plastic fantastic feels right at home.

The shutter runs from a long thirty seconds out to about 1/2000, with flash sync up around 1/90, which is plenty for a built-in pop-up filling shadows on a backyard portrait. The evaluative meter is smart in a way that flatters snapshots, and there is a partial reading and a plain center-weighted average underneath if you want to override it. The trouble is the viewfinder. It is a pentamirror, small and dim, and after you have looked through anything with a real pentaprism it feels like peering down a drainpipe. Manual focusing on the matte screen is a guessing game; this body wants you to trust the autofocus and you mostly should. It also will not do a single thing without its two CR2 lithium cells. Let them die in a cold field and you are holding a paperweight.

The honest weakness, beyond the finder, is that it feels disposable, because it more or less was. Light seals turn to goo, the rubbery grip coating gets sticky with age, and nobody is paying for a CLA on a camera that sells for the price of a sandwich. Cross-shop it against a Nikon N65 or N75 and the difference is mostly which lens drawer you already own.

None of that has hurt its second life. Film students and people easing into 35mm grab these constantly because they are everywhere, they autofocus, and you can drop one without crying. Where it earns the app is contrast. That evaluative meter wants to average a backlit subject into gray mud, so when someone stands against a bright window or a noon sky, take an incident or spot reading off their face with Zone Light Meter, place the shadows on the zone you actually want, and dial it in manually. The body is happy to get out of the way once you tell it what the light is really doing.