Canon AE-1

The Canon AE-1 is the camera that made 35mm SLRs a mass-market object. Canon launched it in 1976 with a microprocessor inside and a marketing budget to match, and sold it in numbers no SLR had managed before. That success is why you can still find one in almost any camera shop, usually working, usually cheap — and why it's the first film camera for an enormous number of people.

It shoots shutter-priority: you pick the shutter speed, set the lens to its green A position, and the camera chooses an aperture. That's a slightly unusual way round for a 1970s SLR, and it's worth knowing before you start wondering why the aperture ring won't do anything. Take the lens off A and you have full manual, with the meter needle in the finder as a guide.

Two practical notes:

• It needs a 4LR44 / PX28 6V battery to do anything at all. There is no mechanical fallback speed — no battery, no shutter.
• The famous Canon cough: a squeal as the shutter fires, from a dry mirror damper. It's common, it's not fatal, and it's a routine CLA fix. A silent AE-1 has usually been serviced.

The kit lens was the FD 50mm f/1.8, and FD glass stays some of the best value in film photography precisely because it won't adapt cleanly to modern digital bodies — the demand went elsewhere and the prices stayed sane. Loaded with HP5 Plus or Portra 400, an AE-1 is about as easy an entry into film as exists.