Canon T90

Thumb on the command dial, eye to the finder, your right hand never leaving the grip. That is the whole argument for the T90. Canon shaped the body so every control your shooting hand needs falls under it, and after a week with one, most other manual-era SLRs feel like they were laid out without a hand in mind.

The shape gets noticed first. It looks like nothing Canon built before it, all curves and a deep molded grip, a collaboration between Canon's design team and German industrial designer Luigi Colani. Photographers nicknamed it "the Tank," and the name stuck because the body feels solid in the hand even though the electronics inside are the fragile part. The finder is large and high in contrast, with a horizontal split-image rangefinder ringed by a microprism collar for focusing. The readout lights up in red LED only when you half-press the shutter, because the LEDs draw real current; a top-deck LCD panel carries every setting at a glance the rest of the time. The exposure scale runs vertically up the right side of the frame, the indicator sliding up and down as the meter reads.

That meter is the draw. Canon put true spot metering in here, alongside center-weighted and a partial mode, and you can take up to eight spot readings and let the camera average them. That was rare in 1986. The shutter is electronic and tops out around 1/4000, flash sync at 1/250, and it fires with a tight high-pitched whir from the motor drive built into the body, pushing film up to four and a half frames a second. No winder to bolt on. It all shipped in the one box.

Here is the catch, and it is real. The shutter magnets and a foam damper inside the mechanism gum up over the decades, and the camera throws the dreaded EEE error and locks up, refusing to fire. Some bodies come back with exercise. Many need a shutter service that costs more than a clean copy is worth, and the technicians who still do that work are thinning out. Buy one recently serviced, or one you can return.

It sits at the very end of the Canon FD line, the last manual-focus body before Canon dropped the mount for autofocus EOS. That makes it an orphan, which is also why it stays cheap. The FD glass that fits it, the 50mm f/1.4, the 85mm f/1.8, the L lenses, is affordable precisely because none of it mounts on anything modern without an adapter. Street shooters reach for the speed and the quiet. Portrait and studio people reach for the spot meter and the analog scale.

When the meter finally drops out, or a backlit subject is the kind the camera's averaging wants to clip, the Zone Light Meter app gives you a clean spot or incident reading so you can place the shadows on the zone you actually want. The T90 was built for that kind of deliberate exposure, and it pays back a photographer who decides before pressing the button.