Canon T90
Canon T90: The Tank that Drew the Map
The Canon T90 is one of those cameras whose importance is genuinely hard to overstate. Look at almost any digital camera made by anyone in the last three decades — the curvy moulded shell, the right-hand grip with the shutter button on top, the LCD panel on the top deck, the wheel next to the shutter release for changing settings, the mode dial on the left, the multi-spot metering, the integrated motor drive that has quietly eliminated the wind-on lever — and you are looking at a design language that was very largely invented for one camera, released in February 1986, that managed only thirteen months as Canon's flagship before being made commercially redundant by Canon's own EOS system. That camera is the one in the photograph above. It is the last professional manual-focus body Canon ever built, the last professional camera to use the FD lens mount, and arguably the most influential single SLR design of the post-war era (Wikipedia, B&H Photo).
It also happens to be the camera I bought brand new, with the entire savings from a Saturday job cooking hamburgers at the local Wimpy, when I was sixteen years old. My first ‘serious’ camera. It cost me around £450 — an enormous sum at the time, and one which took almost a year of weekend shifts to assemble. I shot the Christmas-tree frame at the foot of this post on a roll of Kodak Ektar 100 in December 1986, when the camera was still nearly new to me. Nearly forty years later I still find it one of the best-designed objects I have ever owned.
The T-series: a four-year ladder to a quiet revolution
To understand where the T90 came from, it helps to know that it was the last and largest of a four-camera series Canon released between 1983 and 1986, each of which experimented with a different aspect of the automated, electronically-controlled future Canon believed (correctly) was coming. The series began with the T50 in March 1983, a stripped-back beginner's camera with a programmed auto-exposure mode, an integrated motor drive, and almost no user controls at all. Canon followed it with the T70 in April 1984, which kept the integrated motor drive but layered on a top-plate LCD, rubber control buttons instead of dials, two metering modes, and eight exposure modes — many reviewers at the time felt this was too much technology for the entry-level enthusiast market, but the T70 quietly established the template of LCD-plus-buttons that almost every camera since has used. The T80 of April 1985 was Canon's first autofocus SLR, with three dedicated AC-mount lenses containing built-in motors; it sold poorly and was killed within a year, but it established the lens-housed-motor principle that would later become the foundation of the EF mount and the entire EOS system (B&H Photo).
The T90 was the culmination of all of this. It was announced in February 1986 as the top of the T-series and, in effect, the top of Canon's professional FD line — leapfrogging the older mechanical New F-1 in nearly every respect except lens-mount compatibility and brand prestige. The intention was clear: the T90 was the camera with which Canon hoped to finally break Nikon's grip on the professional photojournalism market, twelve months before the EOS revolution would change the rules entirely (CamerAgX, Kosmo Foto).
Luigi Colani, biomorphic design, and the shape of every camera since
For the T90, Canon did something it had never done before: it commissioned an outside industrial designer. The man it brought in was Luigi Colani, a German-born designer who had spent the previous two decades designing trucks, cars, pianos, ergonomic chairs, kitchen mixers and just about everything else along principles he called "biodynamic" or "biomorphic" — the idea being that man-made objects should adopt the curves, asymmetries and tactile contours of biological forms rather than the rectilinear grid of mid-century industrial design. His sketches for what became the T90 were taken on by Kunihisa Ito of ODS Co. Ltd., who, working with Canon's internal team, distilled Colani's flowing forms into a producible final design. Canon was sufficiently aware of how important his contribution had been that they presented him with the first production T90 body, engraved with his name.
You can see Colani's hand in essentially every visible aspect of this camera. The right-hand grip swells out from the body in a shape that has no straight edges; the prism hump is rounded rather than peaked; the front and back planes curve gently towards the lens mount; the top-plate controls are arranged in clusters that follow the natural arc of the photographer's fingers rather than being laid out on a Cartesian grid. None of this was possible on previous Canon SLRs because previous Canon SLRs had a lever-wind axle running through the top plate, which constrained the entire upper geometry of the camera. The T90 abandoned the lever wind in favour of three separate internal motors — one for the shutter, one for the film advance, one for rewind — and once that decision had been made, the shape of the body could be anything (Kosmo Foto, B&H Photo).
What Colani and Ito chose to do with that freedom set the template for the EOS line, the EOS digital line, and ultimately for nearly every SLR and mirrorless camera made by every manufacturer since. The Nikon F4, F5 and F6, the Pentax MZ-S, the Minolta Maxxum line, the Sony Alpha bodies, the Fuji X-H series — all of them are recognisably descendants of the shape that was first cut into computer-controlled milling dies in a Japanese factory in 1985 to make moulding tools for this one camera (Wikipedia).
It is worth noting, incidentally, that the T90 was Canon's first camera designed with computer-aided design tools and produced with CNC-milled moulding dies. Both were unusual practices in 1985 and both became standard within a decade (Wikipedia).
The body in detail
The T90 is famously nicknamed "the Tank" in Japan, and although you can find people online arguing about whether it deserves the name — by 1986 standards it was actually no heavier than its main competitors — the description sticks because the camera feels much more solid than most of what was being sold alongside it (Bob Giles Photography). The shell is a high-grade glass-fibre-reinforced polycarbonate composite over an internal aluminium chassis, with a textured matt-black finish that has aged with surprising grace — almost forty years on, most T90 bodies still look essentially new, in marked contrast to the rubberised coverings on so many late-1980s and 1990s cameras which have universally degenerated into sticky black goo. Body weight is around 800 grams empty (without batteries), 950 grams with the four AA cells in the grip, which puts it within thirty grams of a Nikon F3 and substantially lighter than the F4 that would follow two years later.
The four AA batteries are housed in a moulded plastic cartridge that lives inside the right-hand grip, accessed by sliding the base of the grip outwards. The choice of AA cells was deliberate — Canon wanted the camera to be usable anywhere in the world without recourse to specialist photographic batteries — and it was a decision that has aged exceptionally well, because forty years later you can still walk into any newsagent in any country in the world and find AA batteries on the shelf. Expected battery life is on the order of fifty rolls per set, or about five years of moderate use (Wikipedia).
The lens mount is Canon's standard breech-lock FD mount, accepting all FD and New FD (FDn) lenses produced from 1971 onwards, as well as the older FL lenses with stop-down metering. The camera supports full open-aperture metering and program autoexposure only with FDn lenses (or with FD lenses that have the green "A" position on the aperture ring); older FL or pre-1976 FD lenses can be used in stop-down mode. This is one of the small ironies of the T90: as the last professional FD camera, it inherited fifteen years of accumulated FD lens range — somewhere around 90 lenses across the line — at exactly the moment Canon was about to abandon the entire mount for the incompatible EOS system. Used T90 owners today therefore have access to a vast range of cheap, optically excellent FD glass, including some of the finest 35mm lenses Canon ever made.
The Controls
There’s a simple elegance to the control layout of the T90. The front of the camera is mostly button-free, as you can see in the first image at the top of the post; there’s just the aperture stop-down lever visible at roughly the 5 o’clock position, and the film door latch and locking button visible on the edge of the camera facing us.
On the top plate of the camera (in the second image) from the left, we have the MODE and Metering buttons, which when held down and the front command dial turned allowed adjustment of those settings. Holding both buttons together allowed setting multi-exposure mode. The little white strip on the left of the prism is a window for illuminating the exposure compensation & spot-metering indicator in the viewfinder. The hot shoe sits atop the prism-bulge and the right of the top plate is dominated by the LCD display, with markers for film-advance settings and self-timer on the edge of the display (a little black triangle appeared to show the selected setting when the camera was switched on).
On the right of the camera body is the large and incredibly ergonomic hand grip — I’ve not felt a more comfortable one on any camera body since. On top of the grip, there’s the large shutter-release button, with the little spot-metering button just behind it. Further back, the large knurled command dial that falls under your index finger and allows adjustment of most of the control settings, depending on what button you press. They got this exactly right on the T90, the wheel turns with precise buttery smoothness, and once again, I’ve never encountered a better version on any camera since.
At the back of the top plate, the serial number is at the left (see below) then the large viewfinder with a diopter adjustment lever on the left. On the right, where your right thumb would fall, three small buttons for highlight and shadow control, and exposure preview. On the right hand edge of the camera, which fits in the palm of your hand, is the ‘palm wing’, a door that flips open to reveal further controls:
Finder Control Lever: Allows you to shut off the viewfinder's LCD display entirely or electrically illuminate it in low light.
Battery Check Button: Press this button to check the battery levels using the top LCD display.
Manual Film Rewind: Used to rewind the film back into the canister before the roll is completely finished.
Self-Timer/Drive Mode: Controls combined with this wing lever allow you to switch between single-frame shooting, continuous shooting (High and Low), and delayed-action shutter release (2-second or 10-second).
The film door is smooth and free of controls - there’s just the small window on the left to check what film is loaded. Below the door, the main power switch, and buttons for ISO and Exposure Compensation. On the base of the camera, there’s the tripod mount as you would expect, and the latch for the battery compartment.
The metering system: cribbed from Olympus, perfected by Canon
The single most influential technical feature of the T90 is its metering system, and the story behind it is worth telling because it explains why this camera was so beloved of working professionals. The T90 offered the world's first three-mode switchable metering in a single body — centre-weighted average, partial (the central 13 percent of the frame), and spot (the central 2.7 percent). All three modes were selectable via a dedicated switch without changing focusing screens, which had been the standard solution on the older Canon New F-1 (MIR).
The spot mode, however, was the real innovation. It was not just spot metering, but multi-spot metering — the photographer could take up to eight separate spot readings of different parts of the scene, with the camera holding each reading and computing a continuously-updated average across the set. Hit the "Highlight" or "Shadow" button after taking your readings and the camera would shift the calculated exposure by two and two-thirds stops in the appropriate direction, on the perfectly sound logic that spot meters read for middle grey and what you actually wanted for a snow scene or a backlit silhouette was an offset from that (MIR, CameraQuest).
The honest historical record is that Canon borrowed the multi-spot idea from the Olympus OM-3 and OM-4 of 1983 and 1984, both of which had pioneered the technique. But Canon refined and operationalised it on the T90 to a degree that Olympus had not, integrating the eight-reading averaging with the camera's full-program and aperture-priority modes, the TTL flash system, and the readout in the viewfinder display (CamerAgX). What is striking is how long it took for multi-spot metering to come back: Canon themselves did not include it on a Canon body again until the EOS 3 of 1998, and then again on the final professional film EOS-1V of 2000, after which it disappeared entirely, replaced by various forms of matrix or evaluative metering whose readings are taken from preset areas chosen by the camera rather than by the photographer.
The film speed range across all modes runs from ISO 6 to ISO 6400 — itself an unusually wide range, set either by DX coding off the cassette or manually — and with exposure compensation of plus or minus two stops in third-stop increments, the effective working range stretches from an extraordinary ISO 1.5 at one end to ISO 25,600 at the other. (MIR).
The shutter and the famously unreliable rubber washer
The T90's shutter is a vertical-travel electronic focal-plane design with a top speed of 1/4000 second and an X-sync of 1/250 — the fastest X-sync Canon had achieved at that point, and an X-sync figure that would not be matched by Canon again until well into the EOS era (CameraQuest). Shutter speeds are settable in either whole-stop or half-stop increments depending on how you have the camera configured, and the longest available timed exposure is 30 seconds, with the usual Bulb mode beyond that. The shutter is, mechanically, a beautiful piece of engineering: smooth, quiet by 1986 standards, and remarkable for the precision of its electronic control.
It does, however, have one famous problem, which is now sufficiently well-known that any guide to buying a used T90 mentions it on the first page. Inside the shutter mechanism is a small rubber damper washer at the base of the shutter box, fitted to absorb the kinetic energy of the moving blades and prevent the mechanism from rattling itself apart. With age, this rubber washer degrades — it turns first sticky, then to a gluey paste — and the residue gets onto the shutter magnets and the blade edges. The result is that the shutter starts to hesitate, then misfire, then lock up entirely, at which point the camera's LCD displays the now-infamous message "EEE" and the viewfinder shows the word "HELP" (Wikipedia, Flickr forum).
This affects essentially every T90 that has not had the rubber washer replaced, because the failure mode is purely a function of age and not of use. It is most likely to crop up in cameras that have been left sitting unused for long periods (which seems counterintuitive — surely a camera that has been used more should wear out sooner? — but the explanation is that regular shutter actuation keeps the lubricant migrating and the magnets exercised, which delays the gluing-up of the mechanism). A T90 that has been fired regularly throughout its life will often still be working perfectly thirty-five years on. A T90 that has sat in a cupboard since 1995 almost certainly will not.
The fix is straightforward if you can find a competent technician: the rubber washer is replaced with a modern equivalent, the shutter blades are cleaned with lighter fluid, and the magnets are inspected and, if necessary, remagnetised. UK costs for the repair sit at around £100 to £150 depending on the service; after the work, the camera will often go another decade or more without trouble (Flickr forum). Anyone buying a T90 today should either confirm that the shutter has been recently serviced or budget for the work as part of the purchase.
A separate, slightly less famous problem affects the plastic AA battery holder inside the grip, which is prone to cracking with age and can render the camera inoperative until replaced. Spares are still available from specialist suppliers (Wikipedia).
The FD 50mm f/1.8 lens
The lens mounted on the camera in these photographs is the Canon New FD 50mm f/1.8, the standard prime that shipped with most Canon SLRs from 1979 onwards. It is a six-element, four-group double-Gauss design — a slightly simplified version of the optical formula that has been the standard for fast normal lenses since the 1920s — with a chrome filter ring and the distinctive matt-black New FD barrel introduced in 1979 to replace the older silver-and-black breech-lock FD lenses. (Points in Focus)
Optically, the New FD 50/1.8 is one of those quietly extraordinary mass-market lenses that the Japanese camera industry produced by the million in the 1970s and 1980s and which now turn up second-hand for under £30. Sharp from f/2.8 onwards, excellent from f/4, sharp to the corners by f/5.6, with pleasant background rendering, decent bokeh, and the slight warmth of contrast that characterised Canon coatings of the period. It does have some softness wide open at f/1.8 — typical of fast normals of the era — and some light falloff in the corners at maximum aperture, but stopped down a stop or two it is essentially indistinguishable from the much more expensive f/1.4 version that Canon also sold alongside it. The minimum focusing distance is a generous 0.6 metres, which gives you the kind of close-up framing that the Christmas-tree image below was made with.
The aperture ring runs from f/1.8 to f/22 in full stops, with a green "A" position at the f/22 end that lets the camera control aperture electronically when the body is in program or shutter-priority mode. Like all New FD lenses, the mount itself is a breech-lock design that fits onto the body bayonet-style: you align the red dot on the lens with the red dot on the body, push it home, and the locking ring rotates with a positive click. This is materially better than the older silver FD breech-lock, which required twisting the entire lens until it locked — the FDn version lets you grip the lens normally while a small chrome ring at the rear does the locking (Points in Focus).
A teenager's first serious camera, December 1986
I bought my first T90 in late 1986, when I had just turned sixteen, with money I had been saving for the best part of a year. The Saturday job that paid for it was at the local Wimpy, where I spent my weekends cooking hamburgers behind the counter for about £1.80 an hour, and the £450 asking price represented an almost impossible weight of accumulated hours over the hot iron grill. There was nothing in my life at that point that I had wanted more, and nothing I had had to work harder to get.
What I remember most about the camera in those first months is the sheer physical pleasure of using it. Everything Canon and Colani had got right about the design was apparent within the first roll of film. The right-hand grip filled my hand perfectly and the thumb wheel under my thumb felt astonishingly natural, the way the steering wheel of a well-designed car feels astonishingly natural in a way you don't really understand until you've driven the alternatives. The shutter release was light and progressive; the motor drive had a satisfying, slightly muted whir that was nothing like the loud zing of older Canon AE-1 motor drives. The viewfinder was bright and clear, with a microprism collar and a split-image rangefinder in the centre, and the LED readouts along the bottom edge gave you shutter speed, aperture, and metering mode at a glance.
The Christmas-tree frame above was, as best I can reconstruct, shot at f/2.8 or f/4 at about 1/30 second, hand-held, on a roll of Kodak Ektar 100. The selective focus on the felt snowman, the slightly out-of-focus blue bauble behind, the way the warm tree lights bleed into soft golden flares on the left — that's the look the New FD 50/1.8 gives you when you use it close to its minimum focus distance with the aperture nearly wide open. The image scanned and processed here is from the original negative, which I still have; the colours are essentially as they came off the film, with only minor adjustment in Lightroom.
The camera ran beautifully for the two years I owned it, and then 1988 I part-exchanged it for the Canon EOS 620. I have regretted that decision ever since. The example pictured here is the second T90 I have owned, purchased ‘pre-loved’ on eBay in 2006, still in wonderful condition.
What it's like as an object now, forty years on
A T90 today is a camera that exists in two distinct populations. The first population is unserviced bodies with the original 1985 rubber washer still in place; these are slow-ticking time bombs, and most of them have already failed and are sitting in cupboards or in cardboard boxes at camera fairs marked "AS-IS, NOT WORKING". They sell for between £30 and £80 depending on cosmetic condition and the optimism of the seller. The second population is bodies that have been properly serviced — the rubber washer replaced, the magnets cleaned, the battery holder either inspected or replaced — and these are working professional cameras that will give another decade or two of service. They sell for £200 to £400, sometimes with a New FD 50/1.8 thrown in, and they are extraordinary value for money given what the camera does.
For the photographer who can live without autofocus, who likes a heavy and tactile camera with a real grip, and who appreciates having the multi-spot metering that essentially no other 35mm camera ever offered, the T90 remains one of the great bargains of secondhand photography. The metering is still better than most modern cameras for difficult lighting; the build quality is excellent; the lens lineup is enormous and cheap; the ergonomics are, frankly, still ahead of much of what is being sold new in 2026. The only real downsides are the shutter risk (manageable with a service), the lack of autofocus (a feature, not a bug, for those of us who learned to focus manually before we learned to drive), and the fact that the EOS system has had thirty-eight years to evolve and the FD system has had thirty-eight years to slowly disappear.
The T90 is also, more than almost any other camera I can think of, a glimpse of a future that didn't quite happen. If Canon had not announced the EOS system thirteen months later, the T90 would have spawned a generation of evolved professional manual-focus bodies that took its design further. Instead it became a brief, brilliant terminus — the most advanced manual-focus 35mm SLR ever made, by a company that knew, even as it was launching the T90, that the next camera in its professional line would render the FD mount obsolete. There is something elegiac about handling a T90 with that knowledge; the camera somehow feels both ahead of its time and from a vanished one, like a Concorde sitting on a runway in 1986, all the future already designed into it, and all the future about to be cancelled.
It is still, today, the best-feeling camera I have ever owned.
