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.

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