Canon T70

Canon built the T70 in 1984 as a hedge. The autofocus revolution was coming, Canon knew the FD mount could not survive it, and the company needed a body that pushed electronics and automation as far as a manual-focus mount could go before they blew the whole system up and started over with EOS three years later. So the T70 got program modes, a thumb-driven motor drive, an LCD panel, and almost no traditional dials. You are looking at the FD system testing how electronic it could get right before the end.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is that there is no shutter speed dial and no aperture ring readout on top. Just a big gray LCD and two recessed buttons. You set everything through them, which felt futuristic in 1984 and feels fiddly now, all menu logic where you want a dial. The viewfinder is decent, a centered split-prism with a microprism collar, bright enough in daylight and a little muddy indoors. The meter is the genuinely good part: a silicon cell doing center-weighted average, plus a partial reading covering roughly the central 11 to 12 percent of the frame, the 12mm patch you trigger with a button for backlit subjects. For an early-eighties consumer SLR the metering is smarter than it has any right to be.

The shutter is a vertical-travel focal-plane unit, electronically timed, running from 2 seconds to about 1/1000 with flash sync at 1/90. It sounds like a quiet electric snap followed by the integrated film advance, which winds at roughly 0.7 frames a second. That is slow, slower than the add-on motor drives people bolted onto an A-1, but the motor is built in and you never crank a lever, which was the selling point. The body runs on two AA cells tucked in the grip, cheap and findable anywhere, and that battery accessibility is one reason these still turn on decades later.

Here is the honest weakness. The T70 is program-auto in spirit, and its averaging meter gets fooled by exactly the scenes photographers care about: a face against a window, snow, a stage light. The partial-meter button helps but it is a clumsy fix. This is where a reading from the Zone Light Meter app pays off. Take a spot or incident reading off the shadow you want to keep, place it on the zone you want, then dial that exposure in using the T70's full manual mode with the UP and DOWN buttons, rather than letting the body average a high-contrast frame into mud. Skip the stopped-down setting; on this body it only works with FL or adapted lenses, not normal FD glass.

Who shoots one today? Mostly people who want an FD-mount body with motorized convenience and do not want to baby a fully mechanical camera. Canon FD glass is some of the best-value manual-focus optics you can buy precisely because the mount was orphaned, and the T70 is a cheap way into it. It cross-shops against the older A-1 and AE-1 Program, which feel more conventional and more collectible. The T70 looks plasticky next to them, so it stays cheap, and cheap is the reason to pick one. Check the light seals and the LCD before buying; both age, and a faded display turns the camera into a guessing game.