Konica Autoreflex T

The shutter goes clack, not click. That flat metal slap is the Copal Square-S, a vertical-travel focal-plane unit made of steel blades, and it tells you immediately that this is a heavier, more industrial machine than the cloth-shutter SLRs everyone else was building in 1968. Pick the Autoreflex T up and the weight confirms it. This is a dense, all-metal body, the kind of camera you can drop on a gravel road and keep shooting.

Konica's claim to fame here is real and easy to verify. The Autoreflex T paired a focal-plane shutter with through-the-lens metering and fully coupled automatic exposure, and it did it before the rest of the field caught up. The automation is shutter-priority, which is the opposite of what most people expect today. You pick the shutter speed, and the camera sets the aperture for you through the Hexanon AR lens. The viewfinder readout throws people at first. Instead of a high-low match needle, it shows a vertical aperture scale running from wide open at the top to stopped down at the bottom, and the needle points at the f-stop the camera is actually choosing. Watch the needle, not a centered notch. It takes a roll to internalize.

The CdS meter is center-weighted and competent for its day, but it runs on two PX675 mercury cells that have not been manufactured in decades. That is the catch with every one of these bodies now. The meter circuit was calibrated for 1.35-volt mercury, so a modern 1.5-volt alkaline drop-in reads off, and the automation chases a bad reading. So set the body to manual and meter outside it. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app lets you place your shadows on the zone you want, and the dead-mercury problem simply goes away. You get the meter the body can no longer trust.

The shutter tops out at 1/500, respectable for 1968, and it flash-syncs around 1/120, which is genuinely useful daylight-fill territory for a focal-plane camera of this age. There is no hot shoe, only two PC sync ports for X and M. The Copal Square mechanism keeps accurate time in deep cold and after decades of use, which is more than the rubberized cloth shutters of its rivals can promise. And the body is fully mechanical, so a dead battery costs you only the meter and its auto-exposure, not the camera. You simply shoot in full manual.

Today the Autoreflex T trades cheap, often cheaper than the Canon FTb or Minolta SRT it competes with, mostly because the AR mount never got the third-party lens flood that Canon and Pentax enjoyed. That is the honest weakness, and it is a system problem rather than a body problem. The Hexanon glass that does exist is excellent and undervalued, especially the 57mm f1.4 and the 52mm f1.8. Buy one with a known-good shutter, ignore the meter, carry an external reading, and you have a tank that will keep running long after fussier bodies have died.