Canon Pellix

In 1965 the camera to beat was the Nikon F, a clattering system body whose mirror flipped up and blacked out the finder at the instant of exposure, same as every other SLR on earth. Canon's answer refused to play. The Pellix bolted in a mirror that does not move at all, a sheet of Mylar so thin (about two hundredths of a millimeter) that most of the light passes straight through to the film and a portion bounces up to your eye. The finder never blacks out. The mirror never slaps. Where the Nikon F announced every frame with a bang, the Pellix releases with a soft mechanical sigh, and you watch the whole exposure happen.

That trick is the entire reason to own one, and it is also the reason most people did not. The fixed mirror splits the light roughly two ways, sending about a third to your eye and keeping the rest for the film. So the finder is genuinely dim, down something like 1.7 stops from a normal SLR, because your eye only ever gets that smaller slice. The film fares better and loses about half a stop to the semi-transparent mirror, a penalty you carry on every shot but a modest one. Focusing a slow lens in low light is still hard work. Canon clearly knew it, which is why the body shipped paired with the FL 58mm f1.2, a lens fast enough to push some brightness back into that gloomy finder.

The meter is the part that ages worst. It is a CdS cell on a little paddle that you swing down into the light path to take a TTL spot reading off roughly the central twelve percent of the frame, and it only works stopped down to your shooting aperture. So the routine is: meter the scene, close the lens to its working f-stop, watch the finder go darker still, match the needle, swing the paddle back up, then shoot. It is slow and it is clumsy next to the open-aperture TTL that the Spotmatic and the later Canon FT made standard within a couple of years. A handheld reading sidesteps the whole sequence. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you set exposure without the swing-paddle dance and without losing half a stop through a dim finder, then you just dial the lens and fire.

The rest of the body is honest 1960s Canon, with one detail forced by the fixed mirror. The focal-plane shutter runs from one second up to about 1/1000 plus bulb, and its curtains are metal (titanium) rather than the usual rubberised cloth. That is not a flex, it is a necessity: because the mirror never swings up to shade it, the curtain sits permanently exposed, and a fast lens aimed at the sun would burn a hole straight through fabric. Flash sync sits down in the 1/60 neighborhood. The FL mount gives you a deep and cheap pool of glass, and the QL version that followed added Canon's Quick Load film system so you stopped fighting the take-up spool. It is solid and heavy and feels machined rather than molded.

Today the Pellix is a collector's curiosity more than a working tool, and the price reflects that, usually cheaper than a clean F or a Spotmatic because the dim finder and the fussy meter scare people off. Buy one because you want the strangeness. The mirror that holds still, the release that barely speaks, a subject you never lose sight of for even a single frame. Shoot a fast lens, lean on a separate meter, and the Pellix hands you something no conventional SLR of its decade can manage.