Canon FTb

March 1971 was the month everything changed at Canon: the professional F-1, the new FD lens mount and the FTb all arrived together. The F-1 was the system camera — over 180 accessories, specified to work from minus thirty to plus sixty degrees, and later the official 35mm camera of the Montreal and Lake Placid Olympics. The FTb's job was to carry that same new mount to everybody who was not a professional. Canon calls it the high-quality mass-market model, which undersells it. It is built to a standard close to the F-1's, without the interchangeable finders and the motor drive. Canon says production reached a million units within three years of launch. That is Canon's own figure and has not been independently audited, but it is more than most makers disclosed. The meter is the thing that makes it interesting to use now. It is a partial meter reading the central twelve per cent of the frame, and the rectangle it reads is marked on the focusing screen, so you can see exactly what you are metering. That is a different and more deliberate instrument than the centre-weighted average in an AE-1, and it is why people who want to learn exposure are steered here. On names: the camera is properly the FTb QL — QL is Canon's quick-loading badge and is on essentially all of them, not a separate model. The FTb-N of July 1973 is a genuine revision: it adds the shutter speed in the viewfinder, a larger shutter button, a plastic-tipped advance lever and a slimmer self-timer lever. Nothing changed in the optics, the shutter or the metering. The in-finder shutter speed is the only reason to prefer one, and prices are much the same.

Learning exposure properly. Fully manual, match-needle, with a partial meter you can aim. Cold weather, remote travel, and anywhere you cannot replace a battery. The shutter is entirely mechanical; the battery runs the meter and nothing else. A meterless FTb is not a broken camera, it is a camera you use with a handheld meter or Sunny 16, and it should be priced lower rather than written off. Tripod work, because it has mirror lockup — which the AE-1 does not. Long exposures on B, and multiple exposures. Older FL lenses, which mount and work here in stopped-down metering because the camera has a proper stop-down lever and a match needle. They are often very cheap. That is an advantage the AE-1 does not really have. Where it falls short: the meter needs a battery decision, and none of the options is free — see below. No automation whatsoever. 750 grams for the body alone, over a kilo with a fast fifty. No motor drive or winder of any kind. 1/1000 top speed and 1/60 sync. A fixed screen with a microprism centre, which is harder to use with slow lenses than a split image. And on the 1971 FTb there is no shutter speed in the viewfinder — buy the FTb-N if that matters to you. For lenses: the FD 50mm f/1.8 and f/1.4 are the natural partners, and the earliest chrome-nose FD lenses suit a chrome body.

The single most useful test on any mechanical SLR. Open the back, take the lens off, set 1/1000, hold the camera up to a window and fire while looking through the gate. You should see one clear, even flash of light across the whole frame. If one side is darker, or you see nothing at all, the second curtain is catching the first. Repeat at 1/500 and 1/250. Then fire at 1 second and count — a gummed slow-speed escapement runs long or buzzes.

Before you judge the film advance: check the lock collar around the shutter button, which stops the lever part way through its stroke, and check the self-timer lever is at rest. Then work the advance through ten full strokes.

Lay a strip of scrap film across the take-up spool, close the back and wind. Watch the rewind knob: it should turn backwards as you advance. If it does not, the film is not being pulled.

Ask what type is fitted before you judge the reading. Sweep from a bright window to a dark corner; the needle must move smoothly and return. Then compare against a handheld meter in bright light and again in dim light — an error that changes between the two is the alkaline signature, not a broken meter.

For corrosion. The most common cause of a dead FTb meter.

The door channels and the foam above the mirror. Mirror lockup and the stop-down lever, both on the front cluster. And every FD lens: off the camera, set to f/16, aperture lever worked by hand. The blades must snap, dry.

Most cameras sent for repair are not broken. Put a fresh set in before you conclude anything, and do it before you test any other fault on this page, because tired cells imitate half of them. Use ordinary alkaline cells, not rechargeables. Not because rechargeables damage anything — they do not, and one or two makers supplied their own rechargeable packs — but because of three things that all read as a broken camera. A nickel-metal-hydride cell is 1.2 volts against an alkaline's 1.5, so six of them give 7.2 volts where the camera expects 9. A battery check built for alkalines reads that as flat. A meter calibrated at 1.5 volts reads the light wrong at 1.2. And ordinary rechargeables lose ten to fifteen per cent of their charge every month sitting in a drawer, so a camera used three times a year is dead every time you pick it up, where alkalines lose two or three per cent in a year. If you want rechargeables anyway, use low-self-discharge cells, charge them the week you shoot, and trust the battery check less. Never mix old and new cells, or two chemistries, in one camera. And take them out when you put the camera away: a leaking cell is the commonest way a working camera becomes a dead one.

Cartridges do jam, and it is not always the camera. Shooters have reported cartridges that would not advance in one body and ran perfectly in another, and the same fault following the cartridge rather than the camera across different models. The test takes ten seconds and settles it. Take the cartridge out, mark the film through the front window with a permanent pen, put it back, run the camera two or three seconds, and take it out again. If the mark has gone, the film moved. Three separate labs give that same test. Then swap. Try a different cartridge in the same camera, or the same cartridge in a different camera. One bad roll points at the cartridge. Three bad rolls point at the camera. Things that mislead people: the footage counter can move while the film does not, so it proves nothing on its own. And check each roll reads EXPOSED at the end before you send it off. If it jams, do not open the cartridge. You cannot inspect it without fogging the film, and you destroy both the footage and the evidence. Send it to the lab anyway — they open it in darkness and can often recover what was shot. Kodak runs a feedback form for cartridges, and some sellers will replace a jammed one. One popular explanation is worth correcting: the story that Vision3 stocks jam because their base is thicker, being designed for 16mm and 35mm. Kodak's own data describes the 35mm and Super 8 versions of a stock identically and publishes no base thickness at all. The only documented difference is between negative and reversal film, and the lab that documents it says the thicker negative helps rather than hurts. The jams that are documented were on reversal stock.

The meter was designed around a 1.35 volt mercury cell that held its voltage almost flat until it died, and those have been off the market since the nineties. A 1.5 volt alkaline reads high, and it reads inconsistently: the error is not a fixed offset you can dial out, because it differs between bright and dim light, and it drifts as the cell discharges. Do not believe anyone who tells you the FTb does not care about battery voltage. It does. There are four routes. A zinc-air cell, either a WeinCell or a hearing-aid cell in a brass adapter, sits close to 1.35 volts with a similar flat discharge and needs no modification — but it lasts months rather than years once the tab is pulled, whether you use it or not. An adapter with a Schottky diode takes a silver oxide cell and drops it to about 1.35 volts; it is permanent and long-lived, though the drop is not perfectly linear. Silver oxide plus recalibration of the camera's internal trimmer pots by a technician is the durable answer, at the cost of a bench visit, after which the camera is calibrated for silver oxide only. And silver oxide with an offset on the ISO dial is the cheap compromise: adequate for negative film and for people who bracket, but a compromise, because the error is not linear. For colour negative and black and white, the zinc-air cell or the adapter is fine. For slide film, have the pots recalibrated. Do not fit a rechargeable button cell. The whole problem here is a meter that was calibrated for one specific voltage; a cell at a third voltage makes it worse, not better.

Separately from the battery. Corroded contacts and broken wires are the usual causes, and the meter switch can go intermittent. Check the battery compartment before anything else. A cell that has genuinely died makes it a parts-donor job. The reassuring part: the FTb is fully usable with a dead meter, because the shutter is mechanical. Many people shoot them with a handheld meter and never fit a battery at all. A meterless FTb should be cheaper, not unusable.

The classic mechanical fault: dried lubricant on the curtain shafts slows one curtain, so at 1/500 and especially 1/1000 the second curtain catches the first and part of the frame goes black. Two levels of fix. The gentle one is to flush the curtain shafts and bushings with lighter fluid to dissolve the dried lubricant and then cycle the shutter many times — people have fixed exactly this on an FTb that way, and it only works where dried lubricant is the cause rather than wear. The proper one is curtain tension adjustment: three screws out of the bottom plate, two serrated adjusters under a lacquer-sealed retaining arm, half a turn plus a quarter, test-fire, retighten, re-seal. The person who documented it rates it five out of ten for difficulty and says it needs excellent close vision and properly fitting drivers. There is no undo if you over-tension a fifty-year-old cloth curtain.

A straightforward home fix. A traditional approach on this body uses felt at the hinge and individual threads of crochet yarn laid into the channels; modern pre-cut kits work too. It matters less here than on the AE-1, because there are no electronics for the residue to gum up, but crumbs still land on the screen and the mirror can stick.

Two different failures. The three rubber pads on the take-up spool go hard with age and stop gripping the leader, so the film simply does not wind on while everything appears to move. Or the sprocket does not turn at all, which is deeper — often a stuck rewind release. For hardened pads the home remedies are roughening them with abrasive paper, softening with kerosene, or a thin coat of rubber cement, all reported with mixed success. For a sprocket that does not turn, technician. The workaround worth knowing: you can ignore the quick-load system entirely and thread the leader into the take-up spool by hand like any other camera.

Once you have ruled out the lock collar and the self-timer, the cause is either a stuck self-timer or a weakened curtain spring not completing its travel, and the second needs internal spring tension adjustment. Technician.

Hardened grease rather than damage. Clean and relubricate with a very light grease, keeping it away from the aperture linkage, because the ring's spring also actuates the aperture signal lever.

Less dangerous here than on an AE-1, because you set the aperture yourself and can watch the blades stop down with the preview lever — but sluggish blades still mean wrong exposure.