Canon FX

Canon spent the early 1960s playing catch-up with Nikon in the SLR race, and the FX of 1964 was the body where they got serious. It was one of the bodies that introduced the new FL lens mount, a breech-lock bayonet that replaced the older R mount and would, with refinements, carry Canon all the way to the FD era and the AE-1. The FX was not the flashy one. It was the body that showed Canon could build a competent system SLR and make the glass to feed it, and for two short years it carried the line.

The meter lives on the top plate, not in the finder. The FX uses a CdS cell mounted on the front of the body with a meter readout on the top plate, so you set exposure by looking down at the camera rather than through the viewfinder. It feels archaic compared to the through-the-lens metering that arrived almost immediately after, but it works, and on a sunny day it works fine. The finder itself is plain ground glass with a microprism center, bright enough, no rangefinder patch, no frills.

The shutter is a cloth focal-plane unit running from a full second up to about 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/56. It is a soft, mechanical clunk, nothing harsh, and it runs without a battery. The battery feeds only the CdS meter, which needs a mercury cell, while the shutter is fully mechanical and battery-independent. So a dead cell does not stop you from shooting; it just means you meter some other way. Build is dense early-60s metal, heavier than it looks, the kind of body that takes years of bag abuse without complaint.

The external meter is the real weakness. The cell ages, the needle drifts, and even when it was new it could not see through the lens, so any filter or close-focus correction was on you to figure out. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app covers that gap. You place your shadows on the zone you want and set the FX manually, treating the body meter as a rough starting point or ignoring it entirely when the cell is finally gone.

Today the FX is a cheap entry into the FL system, and FL glass tends to be affordable because collectors gravitate to FD. People cross-shop it against the Pentax Spotmatic and the early Nikkormat, and on price the FX usually wins while losing on through-the-lens metering. Buy it knowing the meter is a relic. Shoot it as a clean manual SLR with a meter you carry separately, and you get a solid FL body and a shutter that keeps running.