Canon AV-1
Canon AV-1: The Aperture-Priority Outlier
The Canon AV-1 occupies a strange and slightly lonely position in the Canon SLR catalogue. Released in May 1979, it was the fourth camera in Canon's enormously successful A-series — the same chassis as the AE-1, the AT-1, the A-1 and (later) the AE-1 Program — and yet it was the only model in that line, and indeed one of the only Canon SLRs ever produced, to offer aperture-priority automatic exposure. Canon had spent years insisting publicly that shutter-priority was the more intuitive auto-exposure mode for amateur photographers (the argument being that fractional shutter speeds were easier to grasp than f-numbers), and the rest of the A-series was built around that conviction. The AV-1 exists because Canon's overseas distributors, particularly in the United States, eventually persuaded the company that the rest of the world had quite firmly decided otherwise.
It is also, for what it's worth, the camera through which a great many photographers of a certain generation first learned what aperture-priority actually does — including, in my case, fifteen-year-old me, working out depth of field by trial and error with my mother's AV-1 and a long-suffering roll of cheap colour film.
How Canon ended up with two A-series cameras pointing in opposite directions
To understand the AV-1, you have to understand the A-series as a whole. In 1976 Canon launched the AE-1, the camera generally credited with kicking off the mass-market electronic-SLR revolution. It featured an industry-first CPU-controlled electronic shutter, a beautifully simple shutter-priority autoexposure mode, and aggressive television advertising (including, famously, the first ever TV commercials for an SLR camera) that drove it to over a million units sold in its first two years. Canon followed it in 1977 with the AT-1, essentially an AE-1 stripped of its auto-exposure mode and reduced to a manual match-needle camera for the most price-sensitive end of the market. Then came the A-1 in April 1978, the flagship of the line, which added programmed-AE, aperture-priority, full manual, and a then-revolutionary digital LED readout in the viewfinder (Mike Eckman).
By late 1978, Canon was facing an awkward commercial reality. The AE-1's shutter-priority mode was a hit in Japan but a harder sell abroad, particularly in the United States, where Nikon's EM, Olympus's OM-10, Minolta's XG-7 and Pentax's ME had all built strong sales on aperture-priority automation. American camera-shop salesmen explained the AE-1 to customers by saying, in effect, "you set the shutter speed, the camera picks the aperture" — and customers responded, increasingly often, by walking out and buying a Nikon. Canon's own overseas distributors clamoured for an aperture-priority entry-level body. In May 1979 they got one (Canon Camera Museum).
The AV-1 was Canon's pragmatic, slightly cynical answer. Rather than design a new chassis, Canon took the existing AE-1 body, removed the shutter-priority circuitry, replaced it with aperture-priority logic, removed the manual mode entirely (the only manual setting available is 1/60 second for flash sync, plus Bulb), simplified the metering display, and shipped it as an entry-level model priced at around $150 in 1979 — about a third of the price of the A-1 and roughly half the price of an AE-1 with the same lens. It was sold in a kit with the new, deliberately cheap FD 50mm f/2 lens, on the calculation that the savings on the lens would let Canon hit a particular sub-$200 price point that the AE-1 could not reach (Quirky Guy).
This is why the AV-1 has the slightly stripped-down feel of a camera designed by accountants rather than engineers. It is a perfectly good camera; it is also unmistakably a sales-and-marketing product, built to plug a specific commercial gap in a specific overseas market in 1979. Within Canon's own internal hierarchy it was the entry-level model. Within the lineup as a whole it was the only aperture-priority Canon SLR until the EOS system arrived eight years later and made everything automatic.
The body and the shared A-series chassis
The AV-1 shares its chassis with the rest of the A-series, and that's both its great strength and the source of its only really serious long-term problem. The chassis is die-cast aluminium alloy with a brass top plate, finished in either chrome (as on the example pictured here) or all-black depending on the production run. Body weight is around 490 grams empty, 550 grams with lens, which puts it on the lighter side for a serious 35mm SLR of the period — appreciably lighter than the Olympus OM-1 or the Nikon FM, both of which it competed against in the entry-level market. The black leatherette body covering on these cameras has aged well; the chrome plating is harder to keep mark-free but has the great virtue of not turning sticky with age, unlike the rubberised coverings on so many 1980s and 1990s cameras.
The lens mount is the standard Canon FD breech-lock mount, accepting all FD and FL lenses produced from 1964 onwards. Open-aperture metering and aperture-priority autoexposure work with any FD lens; older FL lenses can be used in stop-down mode. The body has the standard A-series PC flash sync socket on the front left of the prism housing, a hot shoe on top, and the characteristic A-series red-and-black "A" mark on the front of the prism.
Power comes from a single PX28 6-volt mercury cell (or the modern alkaline 4LR44 / silver-oxide 4SR44 equivalent, both of which are still widely available — this is unlike the older Canon FTb which depended on the obsolete PX625 mercury cell). The PX28 lives in a small compartment on the underside of the camera, accessed via a coin-slot screw cap. A fresh battery will run the camera for about a year of moderate use, or roughly 50 rolls of film. The shutter is purely electronic, however, so unlike the mechanical Canon F-1 or the partly-mechanical FTb, the AV-1 will not function at any speed if the battery dies — the only setting that works without battery power is Bulb, which is a useful thing to remember if you find yourself stranded on a hillside without a spare cell (Coastal Film Lab).
The shutter itself is a horizontal-travel cloth focal-plane unit, electronically timed, running from 2 seconds to 1/1000 second plus Bulb. Aperture-priority mode covers the full range; the only manually-selectable speed is 1/60 (also the X-sync speed for flash). Flash sync is via the hot shoe or the PC socket, and there is a dedicated "Auto Flash" position on the camera that works with Canon's Speedlite 155A or 199A to give programmed flash exposure when a compatible flash is mounted.
The Controls
The AV-1 is a fundamentally simple camera at heart, and is therefore not overburdened with controls when compared to its more expensive siblings. On the front of the camera, there’s the battery door and latch to the left of the lens, and on the lens mount itself at the 2 o’clock position, is the ‘backlight control’ button that forces the camera to lengthen the exposure by 1.5 stops when shooting into the light (which would otherwise fool the meter into under-exposing the image).
On the top plate, at the left, is the film rewind crank surrounded by the film-speed dial (which ranges from ASA 25 to 1600) and its silver locking button below. Just to the front of that assembly is the small black battery-check button. In the centre, the hot shoe sits atop the prism housing, and just to the right is the Mode / Shutter Speed dial with a central locking button. It has settings for Auto (aperture-priority), manual 1/60th sec with flash sync and Bulb, as well as Auto + Self Timer modes. Immediately to the front of this is the red LED indicator for the self-timer and battery check functions, and next to that, the shutter release with a surrounding on/lock switch and a central thread for a cable release. Furthest right, the film advance lever and frame-counter.
The back of the camera is completely plain, with just the viewfinder behind the prism housing, and the film door with the door latch to the left and the hinges to the right, from this viewpoint. There’s not even a window to check the film that you have loaded.
On the baseplate there’s a bit more action. At the left, the circular winder coupling cover and the small winder positioning hole just below it — which allow attachment of the Power Winder A accessory. Further right, the recessed film rewind button, serial number and CANON JAPAN stamp, and the tripod mount centrally. At the far right, the control terminals for Power Winder A.
The Canon Cough
Every A-series Canon body — the AE-1, AE-1 Program, AT-1, A-1 and AV-1 — shares one famous mechanical quirk, and it's worth knowing about because it affects roughly half the cameras you'll see for sale on eBay today. The condition is universally known as the "Canon Cough" or, more clinically, the "squealing shutter syndrome". As the camera ages, the lubricant on a small lever inside the mirror box — the one that lifts the mirror and cocks the shutter on advance — dries out and the lever begins to chirp, squeak, or in extreme cases produce a distinct high-pitched cough each time you press the shutter release. The sound is a clear indicator that the mechanism is wearing itself out, and left unaddressed the squeal will eventually progress to mechanical failure (Talk Photography).
The fix is the same on all A-series bodies: the mirror box must be removed and the offending lever properly cleaned and re-lubricated. It is not a job for the home tinkerer, and despite a number of YouTube videos suggesting that you can fix the cough by injecting a drop of oil through a small hole in the side of the mirror box, this approach is universally condemned by professional camera technicians, who point out that it only addresses one side of the assembly, can foul the shutter blades themselves, and frequently turns a £50 service into a £200 mirror-clean. The proper repair, done by a competent technician, costs around £80–£120 in the UK and adds a decade or more of trouble-free service to a camera that may otherwise be ready to retire (Instagram).
A correctly serviced AV-1 (or any A-series camera) is essentially silent on shutter release — the mirror slap is brief, well-damped, and quieter than the equivalent Nikon FE or Olympus OM-2. A coughing AV-1 announces itself across the room. When buying second-hand, fire the camera a few times before you commit; the squeal is impossible to miss.
The lenses: two generations of the FD 50mm f/1.8
One small inconsistency worth flagging up front: there are actually two different lenses visible across the photographs in this post. The hero image at the top shows the camera fitted with a New FD 50mm f/1.8 — the bayonet-mount, all-black, plastic-barrelled version introduced in 1979. The top-plate and underside images show the same body wearing the older FD 50mm f/1.8 S.C. breech-lock lens, identifiable by its silver chrome locking ring at the rear (the bezel itself, including the filter ring, is the standard 1973-onwards black plastic). The final front-on image shows the body with no lens at all, looking down into the FD breech-lock throat with the mirror visible inside.
Both lenses lived in my drawer at the same time, and over the years I owned several copies of each — they are cheap, plentiful, and the kind of lens that tends to accumulate in the bag of anyone who has spent any time at all collecting Canon FD gear. The fact that they have ended up on the same camera in different photographs is, in a small way, characteristic of how a working photographer's kit actually behaves: lenses get swapped between bodies, copies multiply, and the version you happen to have mounted at any given moment is largely a matter of which was nearest to hand. Both lenses suit the AV-1 equally well and both were period-correct for it.
The full lineage of the FD 50/1.8 is worth a brief detour, because this lens went through more variants over its production life than almost any other Canon optic (Jonathan Gazeley).
Canon launched the original FD 50mm f/1.8 in March 1971, as the standard lens for the new F-1 system. Internally the optics were a six-element, four-group double-Gauss design — the same fundamental layout that Carl Zeiss's Paul Rudolph had patented in 1896 and which had been refined repeatedly for fast normal lenses ever since. The original 1971 lens had a chrome-plated metal filter ring at the front — the "chrome nose" that collectors use to identify the earliest FD optics — and weighed 305 grams. In 1973, Canon revised the lens to add their proprietary Spectra Coating anti-reflection treatment, started marking it "S.C." on the front bezel to advertise the fact, and at the same time switched the filter ring from chrome metal to black plastic (the chrome nose disappears entirely from the FD line at this point, across all focal lengths), dropping the weight to 255 grams. In 1976 they revised the 50/1.8 again, reducing the aperture-blade count from six to five, slimming the barrel further, and dropping the weight to 200. In 1979 the lens was redesigned for the new bayonet-style "New FD" mount, the "S.C." marking was dropped from the bezel (Spectra Coating was retained internally; the marking was simply considered redundant by then), and the barrel was restyled into the all-black plastic form that would carry the lens through to the end of FD production in the mid-1980s, by which point it weighed only 170 grams (Flynn Graphics).
Optically the variants are essentially identical from the 1973 S.C. onwards. The double-Gauss formula was, by 1976, a thoroughly mature design, and Canon's execution of it is sharp from f/2.8 onwards, very sharp from f/4 to f/8, with mild softening at the corners wide open and the gentle warm rendering that came from Spectra Coating's particular spectral characteristics. Bokeh is pleasant if not particularly distinguished (the five-bladed aperture, which both the late breech-lock S.C. and the New FD share, gives a slightly pentagonal out-of-focus highlight; the earlier six-bladed S.C. (I) is the only variant with rounded out-of-focus rendering, and is correspondingly the most collectable of the FD 50/1.8 versions for that reason alone). Minimum focus is 0.6 metres across all variants, giving a maximum magnification of about 1:10 — close enough for a tight head-and-shoulders portrait, but not really close-up photography in the macro sense.
The most obvious mechanical difference across the lineage is the mount itself. The pre-1979 breech-lock FD lenses — the chrome-nose original, the S.C. (I), and the S.C. (II) — all use a system where you align the red dot, push the lens straight onto the body, and then rotate only the silver locking ring at the rear of the lens until it clicks home. The lens body itself does not move during mounting. The 1979-onwards New FD lenses (including the one in the hero image) replaced this with a conventional rotating-bayonet system where the whole lens turns to lock, in the manner of a Nikon F or Minolta MD. The breech-lock approach is slightly slower to use but is mechanically more precise — the lens registration to the body is fixed by the lens-body interface itself rather than by the bayonet tabs, which is one reason early FD lenses have a reputation for excellent sample-to-sample consistency. Canon's switch to the rotating bayonet in 1979 was driven by speed of mounting and ergonomics, not by any optical consideration; the optical formulas of the late breech-lock S.C. and the New FD versions are identical (Wikipedia).
Autumn Leaf, 2005
I came back to the AV-1 in my mid-thirties, when I had started collecting older film cameras as a hobby and was buying, playing with shooting, occasionally selling, and frequently keeping anything interesting that came across my path. The example pictured here was bought on eBay, in 2005, for about £30, with the FD 50mm f/1.8 S.C. already mounted; the lens was probably worth more than the body even then. I ran a roll of cheap consumer colour film through it almost immediately — Boots own-brand 200 ISO, almost certainly. That was what tended to accumulate around the house, because they gave you a free roll when you got film developed. The autumn-leaf frame (above) is from that first roll.
The shot is hand-held, close to the lens's minimum focus distance, probably at around f/2.8 or f/4 to get the soft out-of-focus background behind the leaf. The light is the warm low-angled afternoon sun of an October day in Kent, coming through the leaf from behind and lighting up the network of veins. The colour rendering is unmistakably Boots-200 — slightly warm, slightly grainy in the shadows, with the gentle saturation that mid-range consumer film of that period delivered without trying particularly hard. It's not technically a difficult photograph. But the AV-1 made it easy in a way that I remembered from fifteen years earlier — set the aperture, frame the shot, let the camera deal with the shutter speed, press the button. The aperture-priority workflow that the AV-1 was built to provide is, for this kind of selective-focus close-up work, exactly the right tool.
What it's like to own one now
The AV-1 today is one of the great bargains of the second-hand film camera market, and there are several reasons for this. First, it doesn't have the cachet of the AE-1, which everyone has heard of, or the A-1, which the more serious enthusiast collector goes after. Second, the lack of a full manual mode puts off the (very vocal) contingent of film photographers who insist that any real camera must be operable on full manual. Third, the aperture-priority specification, which was the whole point of the camera in 1979, is taken for granted on every modern digital body and therefore not perceived as an advantage. The result is that working AV-1 bodies, often with a usable FD 50/1.8 attached, can be found for £30–£60 in UK camera fairs and on eBay, which makes it an extraordinarily cheap way into the FD system.
For a particular kind of photographer, the AV-1 is also exactly the right camera. If you want a small, light, well-built mechanical-feeling 35mm SLR; if you're happy with aperture-priority as your autoexposure mode; if you can live without spot metering or manual exposure; if you don't mind a single shutter speed (1/60) being the only thing that works without batteries — then the AV-1 will deliver perfectly good results with any of the cheap, plentiful FD lenses that have been floating around the second-hand market for forty years. The 50/1.8 in particular is a lens that punches very far above the £20 or so you'll typically pay for it, and the combination of body and lens is light enough to carry around all day without strap dig.
The two things to check before buying: first, listen for the Canon Cough on shutter release (a chirp or squeal means the mirror box needs a service); second, fit a fresh battery and confirm that the shutter is firing at the right speeds in aperture-priority mode (a sticky shutter is rare on the AV-1 compared to the T90 that succeeded it, for me, but worth checking). Beyond those two things, almost any AV-1 you find will be perfectly usable, and likely to remain so for another decade or two.
Forty-seven years after the AV-1 was first sold in the United States to compete with the Nikon EM, it remains a quiet, capable, slightly underrated camera, and one that, in my own case, taught a fifteen-year-old something fundamental about how aperture and depth of field actually work. That's not nothing for a camera that cost less than the price of a takeaway.
