Canon TLb

This is the Canon you buy when you want an FD-mount SLR and you have looked at the prices on everything else with a Canon badge. The TLb is the cheap seat, and that has been its whole identity since 1974. It is the budget body in the FTb family, the one Canon built to undercut its own line, and it does exactly what you ask of it and nothing more.

What you give up is plain the moment you raise it to your eye. The meter is a single CdS cell reading through the lens, but it is averaging, not the partial-area pattern that made the FTb worth the extra money. You frame, you twist the aperture ring or the shutter dial, and you center a needle against a notch on the right side of the finder. Match-needle, no numbers, no readout, just the needle telling you when it is happy. The microprism focusing spot in the middle of the screen snaps in well, and the screen is bright enough for daylight. Indoors at f/1.8 it gets murky, the way these early-seventies finders do.

The shutter is the part that does the work and refuses to die. Cloth focal-plane, speeds from a full second up to about 1/500 at the top, and flash sync at 1/60. That 1/500 ceiling is the real compromise versus the FTb, and you feel it the day you load 400 speed film and walk into bright sun with a fast lens. You will be stopped down hard. The body is brass and steel under the covers, heavy in a reassuring way, and it runs the shutter with no battery at all. The cell only feeds the meter, so a dead battery means you keep shooting and meter another way.

That is where it earns its keep as a teaching camera. A TLb forces you to understand exposure because it refuses to do it for you, and the moment the old mercury-replacement cell drifts (and it will drift), the camera does not stop being useful. Take an incident or spot reading off the Zone Light Meter app, set the dials by hand, and you have placed your shadows exactly where you want them without trusting an aging averaging cell on a fifty-year-old body. The TLb gets the meter it never really had.

The people who reach for one now are coming into the FD system on the smallest possible budget, plus students who got handed one because it was the cheapest working SLR in the bin. The mount opens onto the whole Canon FD catalog, which is one of the great bargains in used glass, so a thirty-dollar body becomes a real camera the instant you bolt on a 50mm 1.8.

The honest weakness is the meter, both its averaging pattern and its age. It bullies bright skies and gets fooled by backlight, and the cell calibration is rarely trustworthy on a body this old. Cross-shopped against an FTb or a Pentax Spotmatic it loses on metering finesse and top shutter speed every time. But it costs less than either, and it will outlast both of them in a camera bag, which is the whole reason anyone keeps one around.