Canon FTb-N

Drop the battery in a snowbank, hand it to someone who has never held a camera, tell them the speed and the f-stop, and they can still make the picture. The FTb-N does not need its meter to fire a single frame. Every shutter speed from a full second up to about 1/1000 is mechanical, geared, independent of the cell behind the prism. That is the situation this body owns. The electronic Canons of the same decade go dead and useless when the battery quits. This one just keeps shooting.

It is a brick, and that is a compliment. Brass and steel under the chrome, a wind lever with a satisfying short throw, a shutter that thunks rather than clicks. The viewfinder is bright for an early-seventies SLR, with a microprism collar around the center for snap focus and a vertical scale on the right where the match needle lives. You leave the lens wide open, you turn the ring, you watch the needle settle into the notch. The N revision added a tiny shutter-speed readout inside the finder so you are not pulling your eye away to check the dial, a small thing that matters when you are tracking a moving subject.

The meter is a 12% partial (selective-area) CdS pattern, reading only a small box in the center of the finder rather than averaging the whole frame. That is the trait to understand before you trust it. Point that box at a face and you get the face; point it at a bright sky and the rest of the frame goes dark. Here is the honest part. It was built around a 1.35 volt mercury cell that you cannot buy anymore. People run a 1.5 volt silver or alkaline cell and live with the needle reading a touch off, or they fit a Wein zinc-air or an adapter to get the voltage right. Plenty of FTb bodies you find today have a meter that lags, drifts, or has simply gone quiet from a leaked battery decades back. That is where an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its place. You set the speed and aperture from the app, ignore the needle entirely, and the body does what it does best, which is expose film with a fully mechanical shutter that does not care what year it is.

This was Canon's enthusiast workhorse, the anchor of the FD breech-lock mount before the later A-series went electronic. It sat below the pro F-1 and above the consumer bodies, and it is what a lot of newspaper stringers and serious amateurs actually carried because it was cheaper than the F-1 and nearly as tough. The FD glass that mounts on it is some of the best-value manual-focus optics going, the 50mm f/1.4 and the 35mm f/2 in particular.

Today it is a bargain. People cross-shop it against the Nikkormat FT3 and the Pentax Spotmatic, and the FTb usually wins on viewfinder brightness and that in-finder speed display. Flash sync is the typical 1/60 of the era, so it is not a daylight-fill machine. Light seals will be crumbling and the meter may be a coin toss, but a body with a clean shutter and good glass is one of the most camera you can buy for the money. Buy it for the mechanics, not the meter.