Canon T-Series Cameras: The Bridge to Contemporary

I received my Canon T50 as a birthday present from a parent who knew little about photography. But what I surely didn’t know at sixteen was that this camera would mark the beginning of my photography career and also the beginning of the end for Canon’s FD mount.

A sentence like that could only float by on a pillow of sentimental hindsight, but it is true that my first photo exhibit was of images taken with the T50 and, also fact, that in 1987 Canon introduced the “Electro-Focus” EF mount and EOS system, which was soon to make the FD mount, introduced in 1971, obsolete. However, from 1983 to 1991, Canon released five different T series cameras for the FD mount. The cameras occupied professional and amateur ranks, were the vehicles to introduce important Canon technologies, and are remembered fondly by working photojournalists of the era and by the many of us who made their entrance to 35mm photography with one of these easy-to-use yet technically forward cameras.

Let’s start with my camera, the T50. It was introduced in 1983 as the first T-series camera, intended to be an automated 35mm camera for those who wanted Program auto-exposure, simple controls, and a relatively compact form factor. At the time, the manual AE-1 was still king of the Canon hill, although the AE-1 Program had been released in 1981 and the Canon New F-1 was the flagship “professional” model. Overall, SLR systems were losing sales ground to the increasingly automated and affordable point-and-shoot cameras and the T50 was an attempt to pull some of that business back to the SLR side of the ledger. Interestingly, the T series evolved over four years from the user-friendly T50 to the T90, a top professional system, not the flagship perhaps, but leapfrogging the New F-1 to become many photojournalists’ favorite.

T50: Simplicity

The T50 would feel familiar in the hands of a young photographer today. A similar size and weight to contemporary mirrorless offerings from FUJIFILM and Sony, automatic TTL program exposure and a motorized film advance system would take almost any confusion out of a first-timer’s experience. The only setting one needs to make is to correspond the ISO/ASA dial to the film in the camera. Loading the camera is relatively simple, just align the film leader with the sprockets, pull to the red line, close the camera’s back, and press the shutter button to advance the film around the pick-up spool. The few other settings on the camera’s one dial were Program Auto, a 10-second self-timer mode, a shutter lock mode, and a battery check. It was this easy-to-use approach that Canon hoped would pull beginner and enthusiast photographers back to SLRs.

While my birthday gift also included the very affordable 80-200mm f/4.5 lens by Hanimex and a Sigma 28mm f/2.8 Mini-Wide lens, neither got used much. I kept the jack-of-all-trades FD 50mm f/1.8 lens on that camera almost always and my first vacation photos (Alaska), first street and documentary photos (New York), and first journalistic photos (Serbia) were made with that camera and lens combination. With manual focus, and often focusing while riding a bike or walking, this combo sparked a love of photography that continues to grow today.

The T50 has an eye-level pentaprism viewfinder with a microprism/split combination rangefinder, which aided focus by aligning halves of the image within the viewfinder’s center circle when focus was achieved. Also visible in the viewfinder are a few electronic signals indicating mode, underexposure, and flash readiness. It really is a hassle-free camera: I can’t remember the film ever jamming, and its polycarbonate body never faltered despite the beatings it received.

What made the T50 different from the Canon A series was the shutter movement. As opposed to a horizontally traveling cloth shutter, the T50 used vertically traveling metal blades, which allowed for faster shutter speeds and higher flash X-sync speeds. This design, along with the camera’s power winder, enabled 1.4 frames-per-second continuous shooting, and ultimately, it was this new shutter design that helped future T cameras become the rapid-fire system that enticed professional journalists and sports photographers.

T70: The Leap

Canon rolled out the T70 a year later, but this camera took the user-friendly advances of the T50 and added some very advanced controls, putting it in a “professional” trajectory, setting the stage for things to come. While not much bigger than the T50, the T70 immediately presented itself as a forward-thinking camera with a topside LCD panel and rubber buttons for settings changes (no dials). It also has a fully automatic film loading and rewind system (no cranks) and, unlike the T50, leveraged advancing technology to provide eight exposure modes, including three auto-exposure modes, two being optimized for either wide-angle or telephoto shooting. It also supplied Shutter-priority and Manual exposure control and had two metering modes—center-weighted average and partial metering—which read from the center 11% of the frame.

Of course, this was still a manual focus camera with a microprism/new split combination rangefinder, but its impressive metering, display, controls, and hybrid auto and manual exposure controls brought mixed reviews, some suggesting that it was too advanced for the enthusiast crowd while Canon praised it as “entering the computer age.” Indeed, it did have a microprocessor with “12 x 2 kilobytes of ROM and 8 x 16 bytes of RAM” and is rightfully considered an important camera in the evolution of the modern SLR/DSLR. All that ran on just two AA batteries.

T80: Autofocus

While the T80 was introduced in April 1985 and discontinued a year later, it holds a claim to fame as Canon’s first autofocus 35mm SLR camera. It was only autofocus-capable with three dedicated (and now very rare) lenses, the AC 50mm f/1.8, the AC 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5, and the AC 75-200mm f/4.5, which nowadays would seem so odd with their large bulge, concealing an integrated AF motor. The AF system used a linear CCD array for TTL image contrast-detect autofocus and while this camera’s AC mount and three dedicated lenses were only produced for one year, their lens-based AF system laid the groundwork for the soon-to-be-introduced Canon EF mount.

The T80 offered similar metering modes as the T70, an auto film load and rewind system, and an LCD control panel with updated pictographs. Its AF system was its impressive feature, but it was a camera aimed at advanced amateurs and what we would now call “early adopters.” Like its successor, the decidedly professional T90, it offered an optional “Command Back” with an LCD readout to support date stamping and coding of images, time exposures, and time-lapse interval exposure. Two other design elements are worth noting: the soft-touch shutter button that triggered autofocus and the impressive ergonomic grip that had evolved from that on the T50.

T90: The Bridge

For those who used the T90, it is a camera remembered fondly and, in retrospect, even if it was outshined by the EOS system and EF mount after just a year in production, it was an influential model despite being a manual focus camera. In terms of interface and form factor, it seems very contemporary.

Like other cameras in the T series, it was released just a year after its predecessor and incorporated features of previous T models, but the T90, even upon a quick glance, was a unique camera, having been designed by German industrial designer Luigi Colani. With electronic camera advances eliminating the need to place a film rewind crank, shutter speed dials, and other mechanical controls, the designers were free to incorporate ergonomic features and create a camera with rounded edges, curves, a big, rubberized hand grip, and advanced LCD readouts.

Nicknamed “the Tank,” the T90 was a large, durable camera made for pros and advanced amateurs that ran on four AA batteries and shot up to 4.5 frames per second. The camera has multiple micromotors to power its functions efficiently, three metering systems to suit diverse shooting conditions, eight autoexposure modes, and two manual exposure modes. Unlike the T80, it remained a manual focus camera and used a microprism/new split combination rangefinder with eight interchangeable focusing screens.

Despite being the last professional-grade manual focus camera from Canon, and the last professional camera to use the FD mount, the T90 offers a glimpse into Canon’s future. Ergonomic design features first used in this model became commonplace on EOS cameras. The T90 was the first Canon camera to support TTL flash metering, and its X-sync speed of 1/250 second was the fastest Canon had achieved at that time. As the culmination of technologies developed across the history of the FD mount and as the testing ground for future EOS technologies, the Canon T90 is rightfully considered a classic.

T60: The Afterthought

The Canon T60 was introduced in 1990, four years after the T90, and three years after EOS cameras had begun to take the market by storm. It’s a T-series camera in name only. Of course, it shared the FD mount with the other models, but it did not share the T series primary concern of pushing forward with automated and electronic features. The T60 did not have an auto film advance, nor Program autoexposure, nor did it share the progressive design approach of its predecessors; it was quite a basic manual camera with dials and cranks and intended to fill the gap left by the major markets’ turn toward the EOS system. The camera was not even sold in Japan and became destined for markets that could not afford the new electronic system cameras, including the student market. In fact, Canon subcontracted the making of this camera to the Cosina company.

And so, the T-series and the Canon FD mount lived its last moments in perhaps its least interesting camera, but that does not detract from the twenty-plus years of great FD mount cameras and the five-year flash of innovation that was the Canon T series SLR.

Simplicity and Durability

And what about my Canon T50? After at least fifteen years in a box, I loaded it with two AA batteries and used the very convenient “B.C.” setting to check them. The familiar fast-paced beeps indicating a charged battery gave me hope that the camera would work. How I could ever have doubted it, is the only question I have now—I fed it a roll of Portra 400 film, closed the back, shot a few frames and the manual winder budged, indicating that the film was moving through the camera. No digital glitches or error messages would stop me now, but because the frame counter dial was broken, I was not 100% sure all was in order as I shot through my thirty-six. But isn’t that part of the thrill of film photography anyway, never really knowing that you have a photo until it’s far too late to do much about it?

With other cameras in the T-series line, you could at least know that your settings were accurate, but with the automated T50, there is no way to control shutter speed or to know exactly your exposure settings. Using the camera again, I remembered judging an appropriate shutter speed by the sound of the exposure and now, another familiar sound: the auto advance “putch-errring,” truncated quickly by that oh-so recognizable set of beeps indicating that the roll had completed. With that sound I felt an excitement, an anticipation, like I hadn’t in many years. Let’s roll this film back and get it processed. While the images I took with my old T50 may not be worth a brag, they are all in focus, exposed properly, and hey—the T50 still works!

Let us know about your experiences with the Canon T series cameras, or any classic film camera, in the Comments section, below.