Leica R4

What what?!  A film SLR?

Yup, that's right, the Leica R4.  We took a trade-in at work, and as part of our process of checking over the camera we normally run a roll or two of film through them to make sure everything functions like it should.

I haven't yet gotten the film back from the lab, so I'm just putting up this picture to prove that I am still alive and still blogging.  I'll come back once the film is scanned and finish this post off with my thoughts and some samples.  But I'll just say, what a camera.

Konica FT-1 Motor

It's not a Canon this time, but it is a 1980s film SLR.

This is the Konica FT-1 Motor with a really very nice Hexanon AR 40mm f/1.8 mounted on it.

Plastic exterior, steel interior, electronically controlled, autowinding, autoloading.

It's a full-featured, well-built, reliable, top-of-the-line, professional camera, with a ton of system accessories. Even though it dates to the mid-1980s and has a motor drive, it's still a pretty quiet camera--certainly quieter than any external motor drive I've been around. I would say that it definitely was designed to be a shutter-priority camera; although, it still works fine in manual, but the metering display becomes a little awkward to use.

The FT-1 has a vertical traveling shutter; although, for whatever reason x-sync dropped from 1/125th second on the earlier T-4 to 1/60th second, but it now works with Konica's autoflash system.  Shutter speed is electronically controlled from 2 seconds to 1/1000th second, plus bulb, mirror lockup is unfortunately impossible. The camera can be placed into auto-exposure lock mode by pressing the little orange button next to the shutter speed selector and turning the power switch one more notch (I prefer AE.L, so I don't really like the extra button press). You can select from single framing rate or 2 frames per second continuous shooting. ASA is available from ASA 25 to ASA 3200, and exposure compensation is available in EV+/- 2stops.

Thankfully the FT-1 uses very easy to find AAAs which are housed in the grip, and there was even a little larger grip that you could get that used regular AAs. The only problem is that the battery holder is rather weak and plasticky and tends to fall apart over time, so battery holders can be hard to find for a replacement and you find a lot of FT-1s without them. Mine has started to come apart, but a little superglue patched it up without problem (note, be careful using superglue around optics).

I've only got the 40/1.8 and a 28/3.5 for this camera, but both are really superb optically speaking, and the whole of the Konica Hexanon line was reported quite good.  I've sold off a lot of my film cameras, but I've hung on to this one for some reason.  I guess it's just got that 80s charm in all the right places for me.

Examples:

Canon T80

Another 1980s Canon, although, this time we're talking about a fairly unique, if low end, SLR.

I picked up an old Canon T80 for pretty cheap with the AC 50mm f/1.8, and it's really not a bad little camera.  It's not as big as it looks in all of the pictures you see on the internet, but it's full of 1980s quirk and charm.  But what's so special about this camera, you might be wondering, well, in a word: autofocus, to be specific, Canon's first autofocus SLR.

As you can imagine, being the first means that the AF is somewhat primitive and really requires something with fairly good contrast for it to be able to focus on.  But outdoors in bright light AF is both fast and accurate and not as bad as a lot of reviews on the internet make it sound.  The AF motors in the AC lenses are naturally a far cry from today's silent USM models, but they're not obnoxiously loud either.

The major drawback to the T80 is of course the availability of autofocus lenses for it, not that the selection has bad range, there's just nothing there that's anything more than consumerish.  The AC 50mm f/1.8 is probably the star of the trio of lenses available, but it's optically nothing more than the run-of-the-mill FD 50mm f/1.8 with autofocus added.  Additionally, there was an AC 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 standard zoom and an AC 75-200 f/4.5 telephoto zoom.

The camera is auto-loading and auto-winding, so there's no lever advance.  To look at the film transport mechanism, I'd guess that it's the same system that was used with minor modifications in the later EOS models in the 600 series, and I'd wager fairly robust.  Mercifully, with all this automation requiring power, this camera runs on 4 cheap and easy to find AAA batteries.

Some of you might not be aware, but this camera really doesn't have any manual capability aside from manual focus (which is aided both by an electronic rangefinder and a slightly unique four-way split focusing spot).  You can, in one of the auto modes, select 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, or 1/125 second shutterspeed, but honestly that's about it.  The other auto settings do let you sort of set the camera to the type of picture you want to take, but the more advanced modes that we're used to today like Av, Tv, and M are absent.  Even when you attach another FD lens to the camera, you have to set the lens to A (or O depending on vintage) and use it fully automatically.

To some the lack of manual modes may be a drawback, but honestly, this camera is about point and shoot simplicity with FD-lens quality, and in that regard it definitely delivers.