"Faster, Jonny", said Thom York, as the beats began to flag. "Faster" he
said, and Jonny went fast. He went so fast. And today we're going
to have a look at the Canon EF-M.
What is the Canon EF-M? It's a plastic film camera from 1991. It's an oddity, an anachronism. The one and only manual focus camera in
the entire Canon EOS range. Except that it's not an EOS camera. Canon lists it in the "other" section of
its online camera museum:
And yet it is an EOS camera. Specifically a modified Canon EOS 1000. The EOS 1000 had a PASM dial and an LCD screen, but the EF-M
has no time for that buffoonery. It has a pair of control dials instead. The one on the left sets shutter speed, from two seconds to 1/1000th,
the one on the right sets aperture, from a daring f/1.0 right down to f/32:
If you put an f/2.8 lens on the EF-M and set the aperture dial to f/1.0 the lens will not become an f/1.0 lens. The camera will ignore your futile pleas and expose for f/2.8 instead.
If both dials are set to A
the camera uses program autoexposure, and if the dials are set to e.g. 1/125 +
f/2.8 that's what you get. In the image above the camera is paired with a
Samyang 35mm t/1.5
cinema lens, which has its own aperture ring, so I left the camera in program
autoexposure mode and it seemed to work okay. I need to do something about the rusty shoulder strap ring. No, no that one, the other one. On the right. Next to the frame counter. Yes, there it is. I need to do something about it. Paint it, or something.
The twin-dial arrangement is unusual. I can't think of another film SLR with an aperture
dial on the top plate. But it's surprisingly usable. It would have been nice
if the dial ran the other way, so that I could flick from L-for-lock straight
to f/1, f/1.4, f/2 etc, but in practice it works well enough. The camera doesn't use power when it's not metering, and the 2CR5 battery in the grip lasts for dozens of
rolls, so for the most part I just left it at f/2.8 and concentrated on going
places.
The EF-M is the only EOS camera with a split-image rangefinder and a
microprism ring, or at least it's the only one where a split-image rangefinder
was standard fit. I have a bunch of manual
focus lenses, but focusing manually with a plain autofocus screen is a pain.
The EF-M doesn't have a particularly great split-image, and the microprism is
very weak, but it's a lot better than nothing.
Pictured above is the saddest, loneliest public bench. It's just outside
Tempelhof Field. Berlin has a surprising amount of one-person benches. Chairs,
I suppose. Who are they for? I briefly considered sitting on it myself, but
then a voice came to me. "Faster, Jonny", it said, "faster", and I began to
experience relativistic effects, and then I gave birth to a new universe. I
call it tiŋmiaqpak, after the Inuit legend. The stars are its
feathers.
The rest of the EF-M's interface is minimalist. The two buttons on the
back set exposure compensation, and with some wizardry they can also
change the metering mode, activate the self-timer, and rewind the film mid-way
through. There's no rear command dial, no remote release, no vertical
handgrip.
There was a dedicated flash unit for the EF-M, the Speedlite 200M, a
face-forwards unit that hasn't left much of a trace on the internet. The EF-M
doesn't support flash automation at all, so presumably the 200M either has a
built-in Vivitar-style light sensor, or it just fires at full power all the
time. If I plug my relatively modern 550EX into the EF-M the 550EX seems to
realise that it should be using TTL rather than ETTL - perhaps that's what the
one remaining pin in the EF-M's hotshoe indicates - but it doesn't communicate
with the camera beyond that.
The only other dedicated EF-M accessory was a manual focus adapter ring,
pictured at the top of this article. It screwed onto the front of the 35-80mm
and 80-200mm kit lenses, giving the photographer some tactile feedback when
focusing. It's one of those accessories that's simultaneously incredibly rare
and also worthless. The manual also mentions an enlarged baseplate, but that
was shared with the EOS 1000, so it's not unique to the EF-M.
Camera-wise the EF-M is very limited, with a flash sync speed of 1/90th and a
top speed of 1/1000th, which would have been state of the art in 1976, not so
much in 1991. At Tempelhof on a sunny winter's day I found myself constantly butting
against 1/1000th. The viewfinder has a simple speed-aperture-compensation display at the bottom. Some gridlines would have
been nice, but it's no worse than any number of 1970s match-needle film SLRs.
The EF-M has a couple of problems, or at least potential problems. During the
1990s Canon and Nikon cheaped out in pursuit of a new market of casual SLR
buyers, but in the process they skirted the edge of what was acceptable in
terms of build quality. The EF-M is thoroughly plastic and feels lightweight,
although in its defence it doesn't squeak or creak and seems to be put
together well enough. But...
The last time I visited Berlin
I took along my Canon EOS 50, an altogether more capable camera than the EF-M,
and on the first day a little catch that held the film door broke, which
totalled the camera completely. A tiny little catch, but without it the camera
was useless. Googling "canon film rear door catch broken" returns numerous
similar complaints. It was a problem even in the 1990s.
The EF-M has the same kind of flimsy catch, which is a problem, because the latch is essential, hard to
fix, and difficult to come by, although apparently 3D-printed replacement parts exist.
Whenever I open the back I take care to hold it in place, gently pull
the catch, then ease it open, and vice-versa, rather than just pulling
the catch and letting the back spring open. Every time the voice says "faster Jonny" I say "no, I must go slower".
I'm going to digress a bit. I wasn't sure if the 40mm f/2.8
STM pictured above would work with the EF-M. The 40mm STM has powered
manual-focus-by-wire that draws power from the camera body. But it
does work, so the EF-M is at least capable of powering the focus motor of EOS lenses, even if it
can't autofocus them. Presumably Canon had to do this because a few of its
professional-level lenses also used manual-focus-by-wire, including the
contemporary Canon 50mm f/1.0, which would also explain why the aperture dial
tops out at f/1.0. Did anybody in the history of the world ever use an EF-M
with a 50mm f/1.0? If they did, history does not recall.
I was talking about the EF-M's build quality. It also has the same folded-plastic
battery door as contemporary EOS cameras, with a tiny locking mechanism that
has to keep a spring-loaded battery in place. I don't trust it and I never
will.
In its favour the camera isn't covered with the kind of rubbery plastic that
has long since perished, leaving bits everywhere, but it does have a plastic
lens mount:
My hunch is that most people who bought an EF-M only ever took off the kit
lens once, to see if they could, and Canon probably had a pile of market
research to prove it. And I suspect I would have to change lenses many times
before the lens mount starts to wear down. And this camera is over thirty
years old and still works. And the junkheaps of the world are full of discarded film cameras
with perfectly intact metal lens mounts while the rest of the camera has broken. They are like teeth, or bones. They
will outlast the soul. If only the human soul was made of bone. "Faster, Jonny".
But that's enough of the what. Enough of the when. What about why? Why was the EF-M? Why? I have
no idea. Part of it might have been competition. In 1990 Nikon released the
F-601M / N6000, a manual focus variant of the regular F-601. The EF-M seems to
have been released in response to the F-601M.
But why did Nikon release the F-601M? I don't know, and judging by Google
Books' archive of Popular Photography et al nobody knew in 1990 either.
Internet legend says that the F-601M and Canon EF-M were aimed at camera
schools and the budget market, but I have the impression that no-one knows for
sure. Does everything need to have a reason?
It would be interesting to know if the EF-M was any cheaper to make than the
EOS 1000. My hunch is that it uses the same microelectronics and firmware, with the
autofocus routines commented out, but Canon must have spent a little bit of
money designing the new top plate. As an educational camera aimed at film
schools the EF-M overlapped with the FD-compatible Canon T60, which was
launched a year earlier, although admittedly the T60 wouldn't have driven
sales of EOS lenses. The EF-M was, apparently, only ever sold outside Japan,
so perhaps the minds of Canon felt that the developing world wasn't ready for
autofocus yet.
Incidentally my EF-M was made in Taiwan. The serial number seems to belong to
the same range as the EOS 1000, which raises the question of whether the
bottom part of the camera is a regular EOS 1000, and only the top plate is
different. Again, I don't know.
Does the EF-M have any operational quirks? It consistently takes 37 shots from
a 36-shot roll of film, which is nice. It reads DX film speed codes. If you use non-DX-coded film it uses the previous ISO value, so remember to double-check the ISO when you change rolls. The film
winding system loads the entire roll of film into the camera and winds it back
into the film canister with every shot. This was one of those odd things that
Canon tried in the 1990s for a short while. The rationale was that if the back
popped off - perhaps because of a flimsy catch - the film that was already in
the canister was safe. It's non-standard but I had no problem with it.
Other than that, on an operational level EF-M is much like any other film SLR.
Here's a photo taken at the top of Berlin's Victory Column:
Compare that image with the following still from Wim Wenders'
Wings of Desire
(1987), which shows the reverse view, facing away from the centre of Berlin, away
from what was then the Berlin Wall.
Visible on the right is the Kaiser-Friedrich-Gedächtniskirche, a church that
resembles the kind of building firefighters train with.
Wings of Desire was filmed over the winter of late 1986 and early 1987,
at much the same time of year that I visited Berlin, but I picked a duller day.
Imagine if I had walked around the tower to the other side! Then I could have
compared the two views to see how Berlin has changed since 1987. But I didn't.
There is still time.
Does the split-image rangefinder interfere with the exposure system? Not as far as I can tell. The only exposure problems I had were with a roll of Rollei Retro 80,
where I forgot to switch the ISO from 200 to 80, but that was my
fault.
If you're interested in film photography, and you happen to have some EOS
lenses, or you have the appropriate lens adapters, the EF-M is the easiest way to get
hold of a split-image viewfinder in EOS-film-land. The camera was only on
sale for a short while, but second-hand examples are fairly widespread on eBay. It
has to be said that manually focusing without a split-image rangefinder isn't
that hard.
If you just want a relatively modern, autoexposure film SLR that has
widespread lens compatibility
the Nikon F-301 I wrote about many years ago
is much better built and has a larger viewfinder, but of course it's
Nikon-lens-only, but then again Nikon makes some nice lenses.
And that's the EF-M.
