Canon FTb QL

Pull the meter battery and the FTb keeps firing. Every shutter speed from a full second to about 1/1000 is geared, sprung, and entirely mechanical, so the camera works in a snowbank, in a desert, with a dead cell in the door, the same way it works on a bench. The meter goes dark without its 1.35V battery. The camera does not. The shutter holds no electronics at all, so there is nothing in the firing path to fail on you, which is the whole reason people still trust this body fifty years on.

This was Canon's answer to the Nikkormat, the rugged enthusiast SLR sitting one rung below the pro F-1. It arrived with the FD mount in 1971, the bayonet that carried Canon until the EF mount replaced it in 1987. The QL is Quick Load, a little fan of guides inside the back that catches the film leader: drop the cartridge in, lay the tongue across the rails, close the door, wind, and you are loaded. It is one of those small mechanisms you stop noticing until you go back to threading a sprocket by hand and remember why you missed it.

The meter is a CdS cell reading through the lens, partial (semi-spot) metering. It reads a central rectangle, roughly 12 percent of the frame, that you can see boxed in the finder rather than averaging the whole scene, so it behaves more like a fat spot than a dumb average. You match a moving needle to a fixed circle, adjust aperture or shutter until the two line up, and shoot. The finder is bright for its age, with a microprism collar around the center for focus, and the body is a brick of brass and steel with very little inside it to break.

Who carries one now: people who want a manual 35mm SLR built to be serviced forever and do not want to pay F-1 money. It is a first real camera for a beginner and a cynic's beater both, the body you toss in a bag for a rainy protest without flinching. FD glass is cheap and very good, the 50mm f/1.8 and f/1.4 especially, which is half the reason to buy into the system at all.

The honest weakness is that battery. The FTb was built for 1.35V mercury, and mercury is gone. A modern 1.5V silver or alkaline cell shifts the meter reading, usually by enough to matter on slide film, so you either fit a hearing-aid zinc-air cell, install a voltage adapter, or skip the built-in meter and run the camera in the manual mode it was born for. That last route is the simplest. Take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, set the dials by hand, and the dead-mercury problem disappears. The shutter never needed the cell to make a picture, only to suggest the settings, and you can supply those yourself.