Canon TX

Wind the lever and you feel exactly what Canon left out. The TX is the bare-knuckle version of the FTb, the same chassis with the metering simplified, the finder info trimmed back, and a shutter that tops out near 1/500 instead of climbing to the FTb's 1/1000. It thunks rather than clicks. There is a satisfying mechanical bluntness to the whole thing, the sound of a camera that does not care whether you are impressed.

The big economy is in how it reads light. Where the FTb takes a 12 percent partial reading from the center, the TX simplifies the pattern to plain center-weighted averaging, and it loses the self-timer and the mirror lockup along the way. It still meters wide open, coupled to the aperture ring, so the needle tells you the truth with the lens at full bore and the finder bright. It is a CdS match-needle system, center-weighted and averaging, and you center it by turning aperture and shutter against a circle on the right side of the frame. Honest within its limits, and it leans on a mercury cell you cannot buy anymore. People run a 1.4-volt zinc-air hearing-aid cell with an adapter, or they accept the drift and compensate. Either way the meter is the part of this camera most likely to lie to you fifty years on.

Look through the finder and you get a microprism rangefinder in the center, set on a clean Fresnel matte field. Focus snaps. The TX anchored the early FD years, the original breech-lock mount with the rotating chrome locking ring, the generation before the New FD lenses that twist on like a bayonet. That mount is the real reason to own one. A 50mm f/1.8 S.C. costs almost nothing and renders beautifully, and the whole FD catalog from fast primes to long teles bolts straight on. Canon built this body cheap on purpose. It was the entry door to the system, sold through department stores and to first-year photo students who needed something that would not break when dropped on a darkroom floor.

That cheapness shows in a couple of places. The 1/500 top speed means shooting fast film wide open in daylight gets tight. And the finder, bright as it is, tells you very little; no shutter speed readout, no aperture display, just the meter needle and your own memory of where you set things. You are flying on knowledge, not on a heads-up display. The trimmed feature set, no self-timer and no mirror lockup, is the rest of the bargain.

None of that hurts it today. The TX trades for student-camera money, well under what an FTb or a Pentax Spotmatic commands, and it does the same job with the same toughness. When that aging CdS cell finally goes soft, or you just stop trusting the mercury-cell math, an incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app becomes your real meter. Set the needle aside, place your shadows where you want them, and transfer the values to the all-mechanical dials. The shutter does not need a battery to fire, which is the quiet argument for buying one of these in the first place. It will outlast its own meter, and probably you.