Following on the heels of Canon’s very successful, manual focus T70; in April of 1985 Canon released its T80, with an autofocus system built around their venerable FD lens mount. It was not a huge success, as its performance lagged behind Minolta's Maxxum 7000, which dominated the nascent AF SLR market at that time. Sales were not helped by Canon having only three autofocus lenses for the T80; a 50mm f/1.8 and two zooms – a 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 and a 75-200mm f/4.
The T80 was discontinued after just 14 months. It was the FD lens mount’s last hurrah and relatively few were made.
Meanwhile, by March of 1985, the engineers at Canon had realized that successfully adapting their old, FD mount to autofocus would be difficult and, in the end, unsatisfactory. If they were going to overtake Nikon – the market leader at the time - it would need to start fresh, designing for autofocus from the ground up. Canon decided to place everything under electronic control, for lighter weight, lower cost and better reliability. Work began work on an entirely organic system (EOS) that took two years of intensive research and development. Building on the microprocessor experience gained from their AE-1, the EF lens mount became, essentially, a computer data port, for electronic control of both focus and diaphragm control, while using compact, lightweight, and fast ultrasonic motors in the lenses.
On March 1, 1987 (Canon’s 50th Anniversary), it launched its new EOS (which, by then, officially stood for “Electro Optical System”) 650 with its new EF lens mount. When it came out, the system offered only five lenses. A fisheye, a 28mm, a 50mm and a couple of fairly bland zooms. But the design was good, and remains compatible with every Canon EOS EF lens ever made (over 100 million of them).
The camera itself had some pretty impressive features for its day. It boasted precise, high-speed, phase detection autofocus, a built-in 3 fps motor drive (a big deal at that time!), Automatic ISO setting, fully automatic film loading and rewind, and a bright pentaprism viewfinder (0.8x magnification and 94% field of view coverage) which displayed the shutter speed, aperture, focus lock and exposure compensation. It featured a 6-segment evaluative (matrix) metering system, with A, T, P and Manual modes.
It was followed in just a couple of months by the EOS 620, which added a faster shutter, with flash sync at 1/250sec and a top speed of 1/4000sec. The 620 also featured a back-lit LCD and automatic exposure bracketing. Better yet, It lacked a confusing depth-of-field priority mode that was on the EOS 650. In every other respect, the 620 and 650 were the same camera.
The EOS cameras gained top market share in Japan and Europe within months. The US market followed shortly thereafter and Canon never looked back.
Putting everything under electronic control It was a huge gamble, as it made every earlier Canon lens and camera body obsolete, thus annoying their established customer base. But, the gamble payed off, and despite the recent switch to the newer RF mount for their mirrorless models, EF lenses are sill being manufactured by Canon – albeit in limited quantities – some 39 years later!
One last fun fact. In 1992, nuclear scientist, and avid photographer, Silvano de Gennaro used his EOS 650 to take a photo of four young singers at the CERN Hardronic Music Festival.
Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) asked de Gennaro to scan the photo for him, which he then posted on an early website of his then still new “web”. This photo is often said to be “the first photograph uploaded to the internet”, but that’s not quite true. But de Gennaro’s photo of the four women was the first picture posted to the web simply for fun, not work. As de Gennaro said: “It was the photo that opened the web to life.” And it was shot with a Canon EOS 650.
Read more of David Young's ongoing series on classic cameras
