![]() The FL/FD lens lineup is one of the most extensive, stretching from 7.5mm fisheyes to 1200mm supertelephotos, in a wide array of maximum apertures. By the mid-'90s, it would become an orphan, which means bargains for the vintage SLR shopper today :-). With the debut of the new EOS EF auto focus mount in 1987, the FD mount's days were numbered. In 1979, Canon introduced its New FD line of lenses, featuring a faster, more convenient mounting system that was fully backwards compatible with all FD and FL bodies. The FL system had moved them into third place in sales by the mid-'60s and by 1972-73 the FD line became the top-selling SLR system, a position it would hold for the next decade. It would take Canon until 1971 to adopt full-aperture metering with the introduction of the FTb and its newly christened FD lenses. The FL-mount SLRs still required the user to manually stop-down the lens aperture to take an accurate meter reading (like the Pentax Spotmatic), whereas, by 1966, both Minolta and Nikon offered full-aperture TTL metering. This led them to introduce the FL-mount in 1964, which added fully automatic aperture control to lenses and laid the groundwork for their first TTL (through the lens) metered SLRs, the Pellix (1965) and the FT (1966). They still remained fourth in sales, however, because they trailed the other three manufacturers in camera/lens automation. With the final R-mount camera, the heavyweight RM (1962), Canon went more mainstream with the control configuration and it was their first SLR with a built-in meter. The R-mount, with its breech lock lens coupling, did serve as the basis for the succeeding FL and FD mounts, although it used different internal controls for aperture functions. This was due to a couple of factors: 1) Canon remained focused on the rangefinder market as the others went pretty much all-in on SLRs, and 2) the Flex and its immediate descendants the RP, and R2000 were quirky machines with a bottom plate-mounted film advance trigger which was rangefinder-derived. ![]() (Pentax), Chiyoda Kogaku (Minolta), and Nippon Kogaku (Nikon), Canon got off to a slower start in SLRs as far as sales went. Compared to its competitors Asahi Optical Co. ![]() Canon was an early entrant into the SLR market in 1959 (the same year as Nikon) with its Canonflex model in what it called the R-mount. ![]() Following a brief introduction we will break things down via the format of 1 ) Lenses, 2) Bodies, 3) Flash, 4) Accessories, and 5) Reliability & Servicing. Welcome to our second system overview, this time featuring the Canon FL/FD system, in our " Choosing a Vintage SLR System" series. ![]()
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