Canon T50

Canon built the T50 in 1983 to fight a cooling market. SLR sales were softening across the industry in the early 1980s, so Canon's answer was the first of its new T series: a body that hid almost every decision from the person holding it. The T50 kept the FD mount and the optical guts of a real SLR, then bolted on a built-in motor and a single exposure mode. You loaded film, you focused, you pressed the button. That was the pitch, and for a beginner in 1983 it worked.

Using one is a strange mix of slick and crude. There is no advance lever; a motor winds the film with a loud buzz every time you fire, fast enough to keep up at about 1.4 frames a second. The shutter is a vertical-travel metal focal-plane unit running from 2 seconds out to roughly 1/1000, with flash sync at 1/60, and in program mode you never see those numbers chosen. The viewfinder is fine, bright enough, with a split-image center for focusing and a column of LEDs down the right side. A green "P" tells you the camera is thinking. A slow blink warns of shake, a fast blink warns you are underexposed. Two AA cells in the grip run the whole thing, and they last for ages, which is the one place the automation pays off cleanly.

Here is the honest limit, and it is a big one: there is no manual exposure and no aperture priority. Program AE is the only real mode. Turn the FD lens off its "A" setting and the camera just locks to 1/60 and shows an M in the finder, which is its way of saying it has given up. The center-weighted meter does the metering, and on an even scene it does it well. Point it at a backlit subject or a snow field and it averages everything into gray, the way every cheap auto-exposure meter of the era did.

That is exactly where a handheld reading earns its keep. The T50 will never let you dial in a shutter speed, but it does respect the aperture you set, so you can take an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app, decide where you want the shadows to fall, and pick the f-stop that puts them there instead of trusting the body to guess. It is the cleanest way to drive a camera that otherwise wants to drive itself.

Today the T50 is the bottom rung of the FD ladder, which is precisely why people buy it. It is cheap, it is plentiful, and it is a painless way into Canon FD glass, the same 50mm f/1.8 and 28mm primes that feed the much-loved AE-1 and A-1. Shooters who want control cross-shop it against those bodies and usually walk away with the AE-1 instead. But as a first film camera, or a beater you are not scared to throw in a bag, the T50 still does the one thing it was built to do. Watch the foam light seals, since thirty-year-old ones turn to goo, and feed it good batteries. After that it just goes.