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 describes it as a mass-market camera having the same basic features as the F-1. Its finder is fixed, and it takes no motor drive or winder. Canon says production reached a million units within three years of launch. That is Canon's own figure. 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 in our view it suits anyone learning exposure. On names: Canon calls it simply the FTb. QL, for Quick Loading, is a feature of the camera, 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 main practical reason to prefer one.

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. Multiple exposures are possible too, but there is no dedicated lever; they need the rewind-release workaround. Older FL lenses, which mount and meter stopped down using the stop-down lever and the match needle. They are often very cheap. Where it falls short: the meter needs a battery decision, and none of the options is free — see What goes wrong. No automation whatsoever. 750 grams for the body alone. 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.

Check the lock collar around the shutter button before you decide anything is wrong: at L, Canon's manual says, the shutter is locked. Then work the advance through ten full strokes, firing each time. It should be smooth and even.

The single most useful test on any mechanical SLR, and it costs nothing. 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. This camera is entirely mechanical, so all of this happens with no battery in it at all.

Ask what cell is fitted before you judge anything. The FTb's meter was built around a 1.35 volt mercury cell and those have not been made for decades; a 1.5 volt alkaline dropped into the same hole will read wrong, and the error will change as the cell ages. 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 can be the battery rather than a broken meter. And this is a mechanical camera. A dead meter costs you a meter, not a camera — every shutter speed still works with no cell in it.

Corrosion. A common cause of a dead meter, so look here first.

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, and you have found it in thirty seconds rather than at the end of a roll.

The light seals, and this camera really does have them: the door channels and the foam above the mirror. Black smear on a cotton bud means they are gone. Home fix, one evening, and the material costs almost nothing.

Both are on the front, and both are easy to forget. Try each one.

Off the camera, set to f/16, aperture lever worked by hand. The blades must snap, dry. Oily blades are sluggish and overexpose everything, and the camera gets blamed.

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 gives wrong readings, and not necessarily by a fixed amount: an owner who calibrated an FTb against a spot meter found the error changed with light level, and an alkaline's voltage also falls as it discharges. The FTb's meter does care about battery voltage. 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. Check the battery compartment for corrosion before anything else; after that, wiring and the meter switch are the places to look. 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. You can shoot one 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 about five out of ten for difficulty and says it needs good eyes and the right screwdriver. Over-tensioning puts strain on 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. Old foam can drop crumbs onto 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 loading fails while everything appears to move. Or the sprocket does not turn at all, which is deeper. 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.

Once you have ruled out the shutter lock, owners have traced a rough advance to dirt and old lubricant in the gears, to curtains tensioned too tight, and to internal parts broken by a drop. Most of that is a technician's job.

If the ring is stiff but undamaged, cleaning and a very light regrease is the job, with the grease kept well away from the aperture linkage.

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.