Konica FS-1

Close the back and the camera does the rest. The FS-1 grabs the film leader, threads it, and advances to frame one on its own, no thumb lever, no winding crank. A built-in winder in a single body, powered off four AA cells stuffed into the grip. That motor loads, advances between frames, and rewinds, so once the back clicks shut you just shoot. Konica got there before the rest of the industry did, and in 1979 that was the whole point of the camera.

It is a shutter-priority automatic. Pick the shutter speed on the dial, and the meter indicates the aperture you should set on the lens. The range runs from a long 2 seconds down to about 1/1000, with flash sync near 1/100. Instead of a swinging match-needle, the viewfinder shows a vertical scale of LED dots marking the metered aperture, which was an early move toward the all-electronic finders that took over in the 1980s. Focusing is the usual split-image and microprism collar on the ground glass. Bright enough, pleasant, nothing exotic. The center-weighted CdS cell does the reading and does it competently when the scene is even.

The mount is Konica AR, the same bayonet the Autoreflex bodies carried, so every Hexanon lens bolts straight on. The 40mm f1.8 pancake and the 50mm f1.7 are sharp and contrasty, and they stay cheap because Konica never built the following that Canon FD or Nikon F glass did. If you are buying into the system, that lack of hype works in your favor.

Now the weakness, and it is the reason these turn up cheap and untested. The FS-1's electronics are fragile and tend to fail with age. The motorized transport, the very feature that made the camera special, is also the part most likely to jam or stop. Earlier production units have a worse reputation for reliability than the later runs. Plenty of these exist as shelf decorations. Buy one only if the seller will run a roll through it on camera, and accept the real chance that it simply never wakes up.

When a working one does land in your hands, watch the meter on contrast. The center-weighted cell averages the frame, so a backlit portrait or a snowbank will pull it the wrong way. Take a spot or incident reading off the Zone Light Meter app, decide where you want the shadows to fall, then set the shutter and let the body's automation place the aperture from there. That keeps the auto exposure honest on the scenes that fool an averaging cell.

So it sits as a curiosity now, a footnote in the race toward the motorized bodies of the eighties. Collectors of Konica gear want one. People who just want a camera that runs cross-shop the manual Autoreflex T, which keeps working long after the FS-1 has quit. Buy the FS-1 for the history and the cheap Hexanon mount it opens up, not because you need it to last.