Konica TC-X

Konica shipped the TC-X in 1985, near the end of the road for its AR-mount SLRs. By then the company had its eyes on the compacts that actually sold, the C35 and Big Mini point-and-shoots, and the interchangeable-lens line was coasting on momentum. The TC-X was the cheap polycarbonate body that kept the mount alive for one more cycle. That is the real reason it mattered. Anyone with a drawer of Hexanon glass got a fresh body to bolt it onto without switching systems.

Pick one up and the first thing you notice is how light it is. The shell is plastic, the kind of construction that read as a corner cut in 1985 and reads as sensible now that the brass bodies all need new seals. It runs shutter-priority AE: set the shutter speed and the camera picks the aperture for you, across a range that runs down to a full second and up near 1/1000. The finder shows the selected aperture on a match needle running from f/1.4 to f/22. Focusing is a split-image spot ringed by a microprism collar, easy enough in daylight and a slog in a dim room.

The meter is center weighted and fine for snapshots, which is also how it trips you up. Point it at a backlit portrait or a snowfield and the averaging brain pulls down the part you actually care about. This is where a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its place. Read the scene, place the shadows on the zone you want, then set your exposure from that instead of trusting the body to average its way out of a hard frame.

Flash sync sits at 1/120, ordinary for a focal-plane SLR of the period and useful enough for daylight fill. The shutter is mechanical, and that is quietly its best trait. Kill the batteries and you still have every speed, because the lone AAA cell only runs the light meter. Lose power and you lose your readings, not the camera, so you meter another way and keep shooting. The AR bayonet itself dates to the Autoreflex T of 1968, and most of the Hexanon glass from that whole run drops straight onto the TC-X.

People cross-shop it against the Pentax K1000 and the Canon AE-1, and on reputation it loses to both. It has none of the K1000's all-mechanical mythology and none of the Canon brand pull, which is exactly why it stays cheap. The Hexanon lenses, on the other hand, are excellent and undervalued. So the TC-X is really a cheap door into that optics catalog, a competent shutter-priority body that does more than its plastic shell suggests, and one you can keep shooting even when the cells die.