Canon EOS 700

The film winder on the EOS 700 makes a whir like a cheap fan spinning up, and the first time you hear it you brace for a toy. Then you keep shooting and it just goes, frame after frame. This is Canon early in the autofocus era, building down to a price, putting the motor and the brains in the body and trusting plastic to hold it all together. It does. People are surprised by that.

It came out around 1990 as one of the friendlier EOS bodies, aimed at someone buying their first real SLR rather than the working pro who carried an EOS-1. The mount is the Canon EF, which is the whole reason to bother with one of these now. Every EF lens Canon made fits, from a ten dollar nifty-fifty to the long white telephotos, and the body drives the focus motor in all of them. Autofocus is single-point and not fast by modern standards, but in daylight it locks without hunting. The viewfinder is bright enough, and the focus confirmation dot in the corner tells you when you are sharp.

The shutter is electronic and runs from about a quarter second up near 1/2000, with flash sync at 1/120. That is plenty of room for daylight fill, and nothing about the sync speed will surprise you. The metering is six-zone evaluative, which is the good news on this body. It reads the frame in patches and weights them, so it is smarter than a plain averaging cell and handles ordinary scenes without much fuss. There is a center-weighted fallback inside the system, but most of the time you just point and it gets it right.

The honest weakness is total battery dependence. No cell, no camera, not even a mechanical backup speed. The 700 eats a 2CR5 lithium, and when that dies in the cold you are holding a paperweight until you find a replacement. The other quiet failure is the rear command dial and the rubber covering, both of which get tired after thirty years of thumbs. Light seals you can replace for a few dollars. A dead main board you cannot.

Even six-zone evaluative gets fooled. Put a face against bright sky or a window behind your subject and the meter can favor the highlights, leaving the shadows muddy. That is where a spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app earns its keep, letting you place the shadow on the zone you actually want and set the exposure yourself rather than trusting the body to guess. Read the shaded side of the face, set it on zone IV or V, and let the highlights fall where they fall.

Today these sell for almost nothing, which is the point. People cross-shop them against the EOS 650 and 620, and the 700 usually wins on price alone. It is not collectible and never will be. But if you already own EF glass and want a cheap film body to feed it, the 700 does the job and asks for nothing back except a fresh battery.