Canon FTb
Canon FTb: the keen amateur's tank from the dawn of the FD era
The Canon FTb is one of those cameras that doesn't quite get the affection it ought to. Sat permanently in the shadow of the towering Canon F‑1 above it and the wildly successful Canon AE‑1 that came along to replace it, the FTb is easy to overlook as a middle‑child SLR – competent, sensible, slightly less interesting than its siblings. Pick one up, though, and that impression evaporates fairly quickly. The FTb is a thoroughly engineered, gloriously mechanical, unfussily capable 35mm SLR that just happens to have been built at a moment when Canon, having been third in the SLR race for most of the 1960s, finally had everything lined up to take the lead.
Introduced in March 1971 alongside the F‑1 and the brand‑new FD lens mount, the FTb was Canon's mass‑market entry into the world of full‑aperture TTL metering. It took the basic chassis of the well‑regarded but stop‑down‑metering FT QL of 1966, added the new mount and an updated CdS meter cell, and shipped it at a price the keen amateur could actually afford. Production ran from 1971 to about 1977, by which point the AE‑1 had completely rewritten the rules of the consumer SLR market, and the FTb's brand of all‑mechanical match‑needle metering started to look distinctly old‑fashioned. Half a century later, that very same old‑fashionedness is a large part of why the FTb is so satisfying to use today.
Where it sat in Canon's 1971 line‑up
To understand the FTb, you have to understand the family it was born into. By the end of the 1960s, Canon's SLR business was being thoroughly outsold by Asahi Pentax and Nikon. The FT QL of 1966 had been a credible competitor to the Pentax Spotmatic, with TTL metering through the lens, the new Quick Load film system, and the FL bayonet/breech mount – but it metered in stop‑down mode only. By the late 1960s, that was a real handicap: Nikon's Photomic finders had been doing full‑aperture metering on the F since 1965, and Pentax was about to do the same on the Spotmatic F. Canon needed an answer. (Wikipedia, 678 Vintage Cameras)
The answer, when it arrived in 1971, came as a matched pair. At the top of the new range sat the F‑1, Canon's first serious professional system camera – interchangeable prisms, interchangeable focusing screens, titanium foil shutter blades, a motor drive coupling, the works. Sitting underneath it was the FTb, sharing essentially the same lens mount and the same metering philosophy but built around a much simpler, fixed‑prism chassis and a horizontal cloth shutter rather than the F‑1's metal vertical one. (Casual Photophile, Camera Collector)
This was a clever bit of platform engineering. Internally, the FTb was very closely related to the outgoing FT QL – Canon's own naming, in fact, makes the lineage explicit: the "b" suffix on FTb (and on the contemporaneous TLb) indicates the same body now able to accept the new FD bayonet/breech lenses with their full‑aperture metering linkage. Canon updated rather than replaced its workhorse, which is one reason the FTb feels so resolved in the hand: it is a refinement of a design that had already been through six years of factory iteration. (James's Camera Collection)
The trade‑offs against the professional F‑1 are worth knowing about. The FTb has a fixed pentaprism rather than a removable one, a fixed focusing screen rather than an interchangeable one, no motor drive coupling, and a cloth shutter in place of the F‑1's titanium‑foil unit. It also lacks the F‑1's match‑needle galvanometer system that compensates for off‑centre eyepoints, and its meter range tops out at EV18 rather than the F‑1's slightly broader span. In return, the FTb cost roughly half as much. None of those omissions matters very much for a hand‑held, all‑daylight working camera, which is exactly how 99% of them seem to have been used. (High 5 Cameras)
The body: 750 grams of unapologetic 1971
Pick an FTb up cold, and the first thing you notice is the weight. 750g for the body alone, before you've added so much as a body cap. Bring an FD 50mm f/1.4 along, and you're well into chrome‑and‑brass territory, with the kind of dense, slightly cool feel that modern plastic SLRs simply cannot reproduce. The top plate is brass beneath the chrome (or beneath the rather lovely black paint on the less common black version, which brasses through with use into the sort of finish camera fairs price ill‑advisedly), and the body shell is die‑cast metal throughout. Beat someone to death with one, as one Tijuana‑based YouTube reviewer cheerfully observes, and it'll keep working afterwards. (Pacific Rim Camera)
The controls are laid out with the kind of obviousness that 1970s industrial designers managed and modern ones have largely lost. Shutter‑speed dial on the top‑right plate, running from B and 1 second up to 1/1000s in single‑stop click stops. ASA dial nested inside it, lift‑and‑rotate, covering ASA 25 to 2000 – wider than most cameras of the period, and a small clue that Canon expected the FTb to be used with the full range of films from slow Kodachrome to grainy high‑speed black and white. Wind lever on the right, rewind crank and back‑release on the left, shutter release in the conventional position with its surrounding collar acting as both meter switch ("ON") and shutter lock ("L").
Around the front of the lens mount sits one of the FTb's quirkier control clusters: a combined self‑timer, depth‑of‑field preview and mirror lock‑up lever. The little lever swings from a centred white dot through three labelled positions – essentially a depth‑of‑field/stop‑down position, an "L" lock that holds the lens stopped down (useful for FL‑lens stop‑down metering and for working with old non‑coupled accessories), and an "M" position that pre‑raises the mirror for vibration‑free exposures. Doubling all of this up into a single lever was a typically Canon piece of mechanical density, and it takes about five minutes to get used to. Once you have, it stays internalised forever.
The viewfinder is, for a fixed‑finder consumer SLR of the early 1970s, genuinely excellent. A bright, finely ground matte field with a central microprism collar for focusing, an aperture readout window at the top so you can see what the lens is set to without taking your eye away from the finder, and on the right‑hand side the famous match‑needle metering arrangement: a vertical scale with the meter needle moving against a hollow "follower" needle that tracks the aperture you set on the lens. Marry the two by adjusting either shutter speed or aperture, and you have correct exposure. There is also a small red flag at the bottom of the scale that pops up when you're below the meter's working range, at which point Canon would politely suggest you reach for the optional Booster T accessory – an external CdS finder eyepiece that extended low‑light metering by an absurd seven stops, down to roughly fifteen seconds at f/1.2 on ASA 100 film. Almost nobody ever bought one, but the idea was lovely.
The shutter is a horizontally‑travelling, rubberised silk cloth focal‑plane unit with a top speed of 1/1000s and a flash sync of 1/60s. Where the F‑1 went for titanium curtains for shutter life, the FTb went for the cheaper but perfectly serviceable cloth, which has the additional virtue of being fixable by any traditional camera technician with a roll of curtain material and an afternoon. There is one bulb position, one X‑sync setting (the camera has an FP/X sync selector around the rewind side), and a PC sync socket on the front body – about which more in a moment.
Some genuinely nerdy details
A few specifics worth knowing if you actually want to use one of these:
The meter wants 1.35 volts. The FTb's CdS meter was designed around the PX625 mercury cell, now banned in most of the world. Drop a modern 1.5V alkaline LR9 in there, and your meter will read slightly under, which on negative film you'll never notice but which on slides you very much will. The fixes are: a Wein zinc‑air cell, a 1.4V silver‑oxide cell with a voltage adapter (the MR‑9 from CRIS Camera, for example), or a CLA technician who can recalibrate the meter for 1.5V working. Many secondhand FTbs have already had that last job done; ask the seller.
The meter is partial, not centre‑weighted in the modern sense. Canon's spec sheet calls it "central emphasis", which translates to a roughly 12% central rectangle of the focusing screen being weighted strongly against the rest of the frame. In practice, this is closer to spot metering than to the broad averaging of an AE‑1 or a Nikon FM, and it gives the FTb a slightly unusual character: point it at the right thing, and exposures are uncannily good; point it carelessly, and you'll over‑expose your sky.
The PC sync socket can bite. Older flashguns – the ones with a fat capacitor and a mechanical thyratron – can put as much as 300 volts onto the PC contact. The original 1971 FTb has an exposed PC socket; the 1973 update added a small plastic cover for it, ostensibly tidier but actually a small safety feature.
Meter range and ISO span. Coupled metering from EV2.5 (f/1.2 at 1/4s) up to EV18 (f/16 at 1/1000s) at ASA 100, across an ISO span of 25–2000. With the Booster T finder fitted, the lower end extended to EV‑3.5.
It's a 750g body. With a 50mm f/1.4 fitted, you're carrying just over a kilogram. With the f/1.2 you're well over. This is a feature, not a bug, but worth remembering before you sling one round your neck for an afternoon in town.
The QL system, and why it was actually clever
The "QL" badge on the front isn't decorative. Quick Load was Canon's proprietary film‑loading system, introduced on the Canon Canonet QL17 rangefinder in 1965 and brought to the SLR line with the FT QL of 1966. Open the back of an FTb, and you'll see a sprung pressure plate inset into the top of the film chamber, riding above a small set of teeth. Loading film is genuinely just a matter of pulling the leader across the back of the camera until its tip sits inside a small marked area, closing the back, and winding on – the leader is captured by the sprung plate, the teeth bite into it on the first wind, and the take‑up spool collects it without any threading on the photographer's part. (Reddit /r/AnalogCommunity)
Hardly high tech by modern standards, but in the early 1970s, it was a genuine quality‑of‑life upgrade for anyone fumbling with film in the cold, and it works reliably even now. Ken Rockwell's pet grumble, and not an unreasonable one, is that Canon never bothered to bring QL to any of its later FD cameras, even the professional ones – the A‑series, T‑series and New F‑1 all reverted to a traditional take‑up spool with a slot, presumably because mechanical complexity was getting expensive. (Ken Rockwell)
The 1973 update: FTb‑N (sort of)
In July 1973, Canon released a quietly updated version of the FTb. It was never officially badged any differently – the original camera and the update both simply say FTb on the front – but collectors and Canon's own museum site refer to the later one as the FTb‑N (or, equivalently, nFTb). The visible changes are small and quite welcome:
A shutter‑speed display added to the top‑right corner of the viewfinder, so you can read the selected speed without taking your eye off the finder.
A larger, more rounded shutter release button.
A black plastic tip on the film advance lever, replacing the all‑metal lever of the original.
A slimmer combined self‑timer / stop‑down lever, slightly redesigned and nicked from the F‑1 of the same era.
A small plastic cover for the PC sync socket on the front of the camera.
Lens markings on the new FD lenses changed from "S.S.C." to a chrome‑less black‑barrel design as Canon began standardising the FD range. (Canon Camera Museum)
There is also one less visible change, which collectors will sometimes whisper about. Inside the FTb‑N, some of the small mechanical bearings that ran the wind and advance mechanism on the original FTb appear to have been replaced with plastic spindles. An ex‑Canon technician interviewed by High 5 Cameras claims this was a deliberate trial run for the cost‑reduced internals of the upcoming AE‑1, then in development. Whether that anecdote is true or not, FTb‑N bodies do seem slightly more prone to wind‑mechanism wear after fifty years than the early all‑metal originals, which is why thoughtful collectors will often pay a small premium for a pre‑1973 body even though it loses the in‑finder shutter‑speed display.
The FD mount: breech‑lock, two linkages, and chrome noses
The FTb is the camera on which Canon's new FD lens mount made its mass‑market debut, and the FD mount is interesting enough to deserve a paragraph or two of its own.
Mechanically, the FD mount is what is called a "breech‑lock" mount. It looks like a bayonet from the front, but rather than rotating the entire lens to lock it on, you slot the lens onto the body with the red dots aligned and then rotate only a chromed locking ring at the rear of the lens. The body's flange and the lens's rear flange never rotate against one another; they meet face‑on and stay there, while the locking ring squeezes them together. Canon was hugely proud of this and made a great deal of the supposed lack of wear it produced. (Wikipedia: Canon FD lens mount)
In practice, the difference in flange wear between a breech‑lock and a conventional bayonet is so small that nobody has ever actually been able to measure it on a working lens – Canon's own subsequent move to a pure bayonet for the New FD in 1979, and then to an entirely different EF mount in 1987, suggests the company eventually conceded the point. But there's a related claim that's actually true and quite important: because the body and lens flanges don't rotate against one another, none of the mechanical signalling levers wear either. The FD mount carries four separate mechanical interfaces between body and lens – an automatic aperture lever, an aperture signal lever, a full‑aperture signal pin, and an EE switch pin for shutter‑priority autoexposure – and on a breech‑lock, those interfaces only mate once per lens change, rather than scraping past one another every time. That bit really does seem to have helped FD lenses survive in good working order for the half‑century that has followed.
The earliest FD lenses, made from late 1970 through about 1973, are recognisable by a chrome filter ring at the front – the so‑called "chrome nose" lenses – and use Canon's first proprietary multi‑coating, designated S.C. Slightly later FDs (1973 onwards) dropped the chrome nose for a fully black barrel and added Canon's improved Super Spectra Coating, designated S.S.C. The lens shown on the FTb in the previous post – an FD 50mm f/1.4 breech‑lock with the chrome nose – is one of the early ones, and is a small, dense, optically excellent piece of glass that holds its own against just about any 50mm Canon ever made.
A quick compatibility note for collectors. Any first‑generation breech‑lock FD lens (1971–1979) or second‑generation New FD lens (1979–1987) mounts and meters fully on the FTb, with full‑aperture metering. Older FL lenses (1964–1971) will mount, but you have to switch the camera to stop‑down metering using that combined self‑timer/stop‑down lever on the front. Even older R lenses (1959–1964) will mount mechanically, but you'll be metering stopped‑down and operating the diaphragm manually. EOS EF lenses (1987 onwards) do not mount: the EF mount has a different flange distance and an entirely different signalling philosophy.
What it's like to use, more than fifty years on
There is a particular pleasure to shooting an FTb that's hard to manufacture. The wind lever has a long, smooth throw with a small click at the end of travel; the shutter release is a long, soft press with a small mechanical "thunk" rather than a digital "snick"; the mirror slap is substantial but not violent. Everything moves with the kind of mechanical inevitability that comes from a properly engineered all‑metal camera. If you've come to film photography via a 2010s mirrorless body, the FTb feels like switching from a laptop to a manual typewriter: slower, heavier, and weirdly more satisfying.
The match‑needle metering, once you've internalised it, is genuinely lovely. Frame the shot, glance to the right of the finder, twist either the shutter dial on top of the camera or the aperture ring on the lens until the two needles overlap, and shoot. There's no automation to second‑guess you, no exposure compensation dial because you simply lie to the meter about your ASA instead, no histogram, no chimping. The camera is a light meter, a shutter, and a lens holder – nothing else.
Where the FTb shows its age is in the things you'd expect: no aperture‑priority automation, no exposure memory, no DX coding, no diopter adjustment for the finder, no electronic anything except for the meter circuit. Wide open in twilight, the meter starts struggling at around EV2.5, and below that, you're either guessing or carrying the Booster T finder. The 1/60s flash sync feels glacial next to 1/200s on something digital. And the mercury‑battery issue means that any FTb you buy today has either been recalibrated, has a battery adapter inside it, or is giving you slightly optimistic exposure readings.
None of which really matters. Paired with a 50mm f/1.4 FD breech‑lock lens, the FTb is one of the most pleasing mechanical SLRs ever made – the kind of object that genuinely seems to want to go out and shoot another few decades' worth of rolls. The lovely irony of the FTb is that Canon made it as the volume‑market companion to the F‑1, expected it to live a respectable few years in the shadow of the professional model, and then found themselves still selling the thing in 1977 because it simply refused to become obsolete. The AE‑1 finally finished it off, but it took five years of trying, and there is an argument that what the AE‑1 actually replaced was the FTb's market position rather than the FTb itself. As a camera to pick up and shoot today, the older one still has the edge.
