Canon New F-1

The Canon New F-1 was Canon's professional SLR for the FD mount from 1981 until the early nineties, and the last of Canon's manual-focus flagships. It is a modular system camera in the old sense: finders, focusing screens and motor drives all change, and the camera was built to take a decade of daily work.

Its shutter is a hybrid. Most speeds are electronically controlled and need the battery, but 1/125 to 1/2000 sec and B work mechanically with no battery at all. Working photographers asked for exactly that safety net, and it is still reassuring now.

The metering is unusually clever. The pattern — center-weighted, partial or spot — is set by the focusing screen you fit, so changing screens changes how the camera reads light. With the standard finder it is a match-needle manual camera. The AE Finder adds aperture priority, and fitting a motor drive or power winder enables shutter priority.

It takes the full range of FD lenses, which remain some of the best value in film photography because they don't adapt cleanly to modern digital SLRs. A New F-1 with a 50mm and a roll of Tri-X 400 is about as capable as a manual-focus 35mm camera gets.