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Half Frame + Full Fun: Canon Sure Shot Multi Tele / Prima Tele / Autoboy Tele 6

canonautoboy6

I’ve got so many names! But why don’t you call me Mr. Strange?

Introduction

The penalties for doing drugs in Japan are quite severe; nevertheless, the use of recreational marijuana seems to have worked well in Canon’s 1980s design room. Imagine and point-and-shoot camera that could be switched from half to full frame (with viewfinder masking) for two different focal lengths – and a third with a dedicated teleconverter that does not throw off autofocus. Oh wait, throw in an optional intervallometer, time-computer, frame number imprinter back. With Nikon pro-style spatter paint. But while you are doing all of this, build a metering system that only goes down to EV9 and heavily uses flash. There is a business case here, I swear to God!

Half frame! When this camera is in half frame mode, you get a 50mm f3.5 equivalent and a 90mm f/5.6 equivalent. That is very unusual in a space dominated by fast-aperture focus-by-guess cameras (like the Canon Demi), small and unreliable designs like the Konica AA35/Recorder, and bulky “subminiature” systems like the Pen. To say nothing of full-sized cameras that are masked down to shoot 18×24 (Hexar 72, Konica FT-1 Pro Half, Konica Autorex).

By the specs

(from the Canon Camera Museum, whose summary/overview page actually contains some inaccurate information):

Type Fully automatic 35mm Lens-Shutter autofocus camera with two focal lengths
Picture Size 24×36 mm, 17x24mm (not switchable in midroll)
AF System Triangulation system with near-infrared beam. Prefocus enabled.
Lens 35mm f/3.5 (3 elements in 3 groups) and 60mm f/5.6 (6 elements in 6 groups).

* With the optional Teleconverter, a maximum 75mm focal length (110mm for half frame) can be set.

Shutter Electromagnetic programmed shutter and aperture. For 35mm: EV 9.5 (f/3.5 at 1/60 sec.) – EV 15.5 (f/11 at 1/350 sec.) For 60mm: EV 11 (f/5.6 at 1/60 sec.) – EV 17 (f/19 at 1/350 sec.) Built-in electronic self-timer. Bulb provided (max. 4 sec.).
Viewfinder Variable-magnification, direct viewfinder with automatic switch of picture size. 0.42x – 0.63x magnification and 85% coverage. Within the image area are the AF frame, parallax correction marks, and OK-to-Shoot lamp.
EE CdS cell for full-auto program EE. Metering range of EV 9.5 – 17 (at ISO 100). Film speed range: ISO 25 – 3200 (with DX code).
Built-in Flash Guide No. 10.5 (at ISO 100 in meters). Fires automatically in low-light conditions.
Power Source One 6 V 2CR5 lithium battery
Film Loading &
Advance
After opening camera back, align film leader at mark, then close the camera back for auto loading. Automatic film advance with built-in motor. Film advance speed of 0.6 sec. per frame.
Frame Counter Seven-segment LCD on camera back. Counts up. Resets automatically when camera back is opened. Counts down during rewind.
Film Rewind Automatic rewind with built-in motor. Midroll rewind enabled.
Dimensions &
Weight
133 x 72 x 50 mm, 330 g (with battery)

Shooting it

Startup. Startup is instant, in part because nothing really happens until you take the picture. The flash powers up (somehow) almost instantly, and you are ready to go.

Grip. This is a fairly substantial point and shoot, so you will have no problem getting or keeping your grip.

Viewfinder. The viewfinder is reasonable for a camera of this type, and it has a single parallax line and square bracket reticles. It masks down automatically in 72-frame (X2) mode. The finder snaps from one focal length to the other. Little or no distortion is visible, which is nice. There is just a green light that comes on when focus is locked. It also comes on when the focus is not locked. Or when there is imminent underexposure. There is no orange or red light for failure modes, which puts the internal computer at a notch below the usual 4-bit processor in the Stylus Epic/mju-ii, Yashica T4, etc.

Half-press. Pressing the shutter lightly, you get a loud click. Not sure how that classifies as “prefocus,” since the lens is still firmly inside its hidey-hole when you press down. May just be that the AF measures the distance.

Shutter impulse. This camera has something of a lag because the act of shooting it retracts the lens cover, extends the lens, shoots, retracts the lens, and closes the door. This makes it almost impossible to throw a camera with an un-capped lens into your bag. All of this happens inside the teleconverter tube when the teleconverter is on.

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Flash. Get used to it. It is almost always on.

Bulb mode. This is for fireworks. That’s it.

Macro mode. If you get too close, the camera goes to 30mm, stops down, and fires the flash. It makes out-of-focus pictures fairly difficult to achieve. You can still do it. Maybe you’ve met my children.

The date back. The unicorn-like Multi Tele Date, instead of just having a frame counter on the back, has a multifunction back that is not unlike what you would have gotten on a pro SLR (not DSLR) back in the day.

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  • Date/time/etc. imprint (good to 2027, which is way longer than any of these cameras are going to last).
  • Frame number imprint.
  • Calculation of time from a fixed point. This will compute the difference between today’s date and a date you input. As such, if your child is 4 years and 6 months old, it can print that in the frame.
  • Intervallometer. When you want to shoot that flower opening, the Canon has your back.

 

Canon AF Teleconverter. The AF Teleconverter automatically turns this into a(n even more) weird and wonderful camera. It screws into the tripod socket, flaps over the front, and snaps over the back. It activates a small rubberized switch that tells the camera to adjust focus. It can flip off almost immediately like an everready case. The 40.5mm filter thread opens things up to a lot of mischief, including special effects and contrast filters.

Having a 110mm-equivalent lens for half frame that actually focuses quickly and accurately makes this a pretty compelling portrait machine. It shoots at f/7, but that’s within easy flash range. Take that, Konica AA35/Recorder!

The teleconverter also has a quite undistorted view (see the architectural pictures below). It is very well engineered.

The pictures

Quite good. Here is a sampling taken with the teleconverter (which makes this a fantastic portrait machine), shot on TMY with an orange filter (hint: tape over the DX code on the film cartridge), and scanned on a Pakon F135 plus:

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Conclusion

This is an oft-overlooked gem in the half-frame world. It is low-maintenance, easy to use, and has a very broad ASA range to work with. It also has unique portrait capabilities in the half-frame space. But wow, 72 frames take a long, long time to shoot.

Canon 50mm f/1.2 LTM: not screwmounting around

As you contemplate modern lenses, It is difficult to associate these optics with the proud civilizations that created them: Tokyo, Rochester, Sendai, Jena. They worshipped image quality, because it is strength that makes all other values possible. No picture survives without it. Who knows what delicate objective lenses have died out of the world, for want of the strength to continue. 

It’s a long way from the Canon 7sz to Andre Agassi, from the Serenar to the EOS Kiss Merkur XR4ti (…or whatever the amateur model of the week is). Canon used to be a hard-core producer of Leica knockoffs, many of which were more functional, convenient, and reliable than the rickety prewar designs that Leica kept elaborating. The Canon P was a standout, as were the VI-L and the 7 series.

The Canon 50mm f/1.2 (September 1956… can you believe that it is now almost 60 years old?) was the company’s penultimate halo lens. It came out with the VT (not Deluxe), and it would not be surpassed until 1961 with the Canon 7 and its 50/0.95 Dream Lens (from a size, weight, and cost standpoint, dream is clearly defined broadly to include nightmare). Ironically, the 50/1.2 cost more than the 50/0.95. Modern Canon lenses are quite good, but they don’t have that certain fun factor to them.

Synergies. This is a new thesis on my part, but I am starting to suspect that the M typ 240 and 246 tend to interact with lenses in ways that might not be immediately intuitive. Some lenses seem to work unexpectedly well with the color sensor (possibly the demosaic-ing algorithm accidentally boosting sharpness). Many lenses work better than expected with the Monochrom camera — likely because the color-bind sensor is not bothered as much by chromatic aberration. The “why” these things happen is probably insoluble; it is merely interesting that they do. And yes, some dog lenses do stay dogs, and some lenses have bad corners to f/8. Nulla regula sine exceptione.

Look and feel. Perhaps “Carré Otis” is the best way to express the relationship between the size of this lens and Canon’s more common 50mm lenses (2.8, 2.2, 1.9, 1.8, 1.5): generously proportioned, slightly flaky, and exhibiting certain, ahem, virtues.

The finish of the 50/1.2 is typical mid-to-late Canon that came into vogue in February 1956 with the 50mm f/1.8 mark II: a black enamel focusing ring and sandblasted chrome aperture ring and distance/DOF scale. This is much more pleasing than Canon’s contemporaneous all-black lenses (like the 35/1.5, 35/2, 100/3.5, 100/2, and 135/3.5), whose finish looks good in smaller lenses and feels chintzy in larger ones. But the affect with the 50/1.2 is solid. It will keep your M typ 240 on balance.

The focusing effort is heavy, and even the aperture turning is heavy. Unless, of course, lubricant has leaked out onto the aperture blades. The focusing pitch is very slow. Even the interesting push-button infinity lever takes a deliberate effort to dislodge. Is there a problem with any of this? No. Will you have issues tracking fast motion or switching from near-to-far subjects (or vice-versa) as if you were a D700? Yes.

Flare and use with filters. The first thing you have to remember with this lens is that you are dealing with an SLR-sized front element that sits very close to the front of the filter ring, seven elements, and single lens coatings from the mid-1950s. This isn’t going to flare, right?! Really, cleaning marks are the least of your problems here.

The big (physical) hazard with this lens is filters – as in don’t tighten down a filter without checking the clearance between the filter and the front lens element. If you want use conventional filters, you will likely need to use an empty ring as a spacer or fit a rubber o-ring around the threads on the filter. The only alternative is to use Canon RF filters, which are expensive and present a flush glass surface on the front of the lens. Not only does cabin your choices for lens hoods, it also presents ample opportunity for sidelight flare. Like the picture below (and let’s be fair – this is shot outdoors with floodlights everywhere). But be sure to use some kind of hood if you can.

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Canon filter ghosting (at f/1.2). All hell is breaking loose here (not surprising with Christmas lights a scant two feet from the lens), but it’s not all bad, given the motif:

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On balance, it is better to use a filter if you don’t want to deal with the rickety Canon metal lens caps, which never want to stay on. Just watch how you use it, and if you can space it correctly, consider an MRC.

General optical performance. On an M, at 24mp, the 50/1.2 really acts like Beauty and the Beast. At its largest aperture, it has microscopic depth of field, though with practice, you can tell where it is going to land. It does what most other super-fast spherical lenses do: it front focuses at wider apertures and settles down at middle ones. Every one of the three copies I have owned seems to have had slight differences in the midpoint of depth of field at close ranges and large apertures, which is not surprising. But this is par for the course; all fast 50mm lenses are testy on Leica rangefinders. As you start stopping down, the 50/1.2 becomes exponentially sharper. F/1.4 is light years better than 1.2; f/2.8 is orders of magnitude better yet.

Rather than dragging through every optical trait one at a time, let’s take it at f/1.2. Soft contrast, heavy vignetting, reasonable resolution of details, with a field that seems to curve at the edges toward the camera. This vignetting persists, even when the lens is coded as a Leica Noctilux. To be fair, this was more than enough for most 35mm film use. A lens like the Canon 50/1.2 would be used at night, where contrast would be high. It was not designed for thin depth-of-field fetishism. You can click on the picture below for a full-sized image.

IMG_5453

The picture at the top of this article is also shot at f/1.2. In terms of controlling bokeh, if you are into that thing, this is yet another lens where your best bokeh is achieved by (a) getting the subject as close as possible and (b) getting the background as far away as possible. Not to belabor a point from the previous article (on the MS-Sonnetar), but an easy and almost unavoidable rule of thumb is that the better a lens performs wide-open, the worse the bokeh. The list of these suppressed lenses is long and distinguished: this Canon, almost every Noctilux, the Hexanon Limited, the Nokton 1.1, the Nikkor 1.1, and basically any lens faster than f/1.4.

The next click, f/1.4, is a touch more contrasty, and is still a good setting to use in harsh nighttime conditions. Take a look at the field curvature here – there is no way the Gummi Bear wrapper should be so close to being in focus like the boys. Actually, it seems unlikely that both boys should be in focus, but there you have it. And here you also have the bokeh vibe. As in vibration.

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Just for fun, below is one shot wide-open with an M8 (you can click on it to see it at full size):

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Stopping down to f/2 gives better results yet – and the focusing point is now exactly where you would expect it to be. And here is your bokeh test outdoors. This is essentially minimum focusing distance with a background that is 50m away.

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At f/2.8, the lens is starting to hit its stride. Especially with the M set for emulation of the Leica 50/1.2, the lighting evens up, the sharpness goes up significantly, and the field flattens a bit. Although this begs the question of getting a slower lens and shooting more wide-open, with these old lenses, you are often better off with a fast lens stopped down than a slow lens wide-open. Also, the big old glass looks cooler and makes child ward nurses less likely to think you are using some kind of super-high-tech digital camera to document medical procedures (when you’re actually just bored).

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At f/4, performance starts to max out (like the 1.2 shot, you can click on the one below to get a full-sized image). You almost go into double-take mode because a good example of the lens looks sharper than lot of modern glass. I’m thinking particularly of the 50/1.4 AF Nikkor, which the Canon crushes – and likely because the Nikon is usually tied to a somewhat limited AF system (phase detect systems seem pretty much incapable of compensating for the focus shift that occurs when a lens stops down).

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F/8 is where performance starts to degrade a little bit (see the full-sized image). Sharpness starts to decline. People take on cartoonish, ascetic, or vampiric features. Bring your gloves, lightsabers, and garlic.

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Conclusion? This lens was sold as the premium lens on a lot of Canon cameras – and in some ways a “bragging rights” lens vis-à-vis Leica and Nikon. The performance at f/1.2 is reasonable but not world-beating; but given limits seen even in digital M shutters (1/4000 sec), you would rarely be trying to shoot this lens wide-open in daylight. At least absent a neutral-density filter.

The pricing of this lens is all over the place; super-clean examples (from a cosmetic standpoint) seem to command a hefty premium, but almost all will exhibit microscopic scratches (cleaning marks), and oil haze is a recurring theme (and it is fairly destructive to these lenses’ coatings). But as with a lot of things, cosmetics are not indicative of performance; you never know whether a lens has been abused over the years until you actually try it.

Be ready to poke around through multiple examples to get one that works really well; keep an open mind about the condition of the coatings; what makes these lenses flare badly has little to do with the coatings but rather with the hazards of having that really big front element.

Block diagrams of Canon RF lenses

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Thanks to Mr. C.K. Soh