Canon FT QL

Point it at a man standing in a doorway with the street blazing behind him, and the FT QL gets the exposure that an averaging meter throws away. There is a small rectangle etched in the center of the finder, and the CdS cell reads only that box, roughly the central 12 percent of the frame, not the whole bright mess around it. Fill that box with his face, match the needle, and you have a backlit portrait that holds. Partial metering like this was uncommon on SLRs in 1966, where a meter reading the whole frame could easily burn that face to a silhouette. This one looked at the part you cared about.

That partial pattern was Canon's big idea here, and the QL was the other one. Quick Load is a little fan of guides inside the back door that grabs the film leader for you. Drop the cartridge in, flop the tongue across the rails, shut the back, wind twice. No threading the take-up spool by feel in the cold. The FT carried both of these on the FL mount, Canon's breech-lock bayonet from the second half of the sixties, where a rotating chrome ring clamps the lens down while the lens body itself never turns. The FD mount that followed kept that same breech-lock but added the full-aperture metering coupling the FL lacked. The FT sat below the Pellix and the eventual F-1 as the enthusiast body, the camera a serious amateur bought when a rangefinder no longer cut it.

It is a slab of brass and chrome with very little inside to fail. The shutter is a cloth focal-plane unit, fully mechanical, running from a full second up to about 1/1000, flash sync at the period-standard 1/60. The cell powers the meter and nothing else, so a dead battery costs you the needle and not a single frame. You leave the lens open, frame, then flip the stop-down lever to take the reading. The finder is decent for its age, with a microprism center for focus, and the wind lever has the short positive throw these mid-sixties Canons all share.

Here is the honest weakness, and it is baked into the FL mount. The FT meters stopped down. There is no full-aperture metering, so every reading dims the finder as the diaphragm closes, and you are squinting at a darker frame to set exposure on a moving subject. The FTb that replaced it fixed exactly this with FD full-aperture metering. The other catch is the battery: the FT was built for a 1.35 volt mercury cell that no longer exists, so the meter on most surviving bodies reads off, drifts, or has gone silent after a leaked cell sat in the door for decades.

Both of those problems have the same answer. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app sets your exposure cleanly, no stop-down dimming and no dead-mercury guesswork, and you turn the dials by hand. The shutter never needed the cell to make a picture, only to suggest the settings, and you can supply those yourself. Today it is a cheap, tough way into FL and FD glass, cross-shopped against the Pentax Spotmatic and the Minolta SRT-101. Buy it for the mechanics and that central box, meter it with something modern, and it just keeps working.