Which EOS

Joined: 16 Jun 2005 Posts: 51 Location: Liverpool, England

Hi,

I have been looking at getting a cheap 2nd hand EOS film camera to play around with and am not sure which one to plump for.

The two I have my eye on at the moment are the 850 and 1000FN.

I was just wondering if anybody on here could impart some of their experience of these cameras to help me decide.

Many thanks.

Posted: Thu Jun 28, 2007 12:08 pm

Make sure you do some google searching to see if they suffer from the sticky shutter curtain issue. I bought an EOS 10s to run infrared film through (it doesn't use an infrared diode for film advance sprocket counting like most of the newer EOS film bodies) and it's almost useless right now. I'll need to overhaul the shutter somewhere if I want it to be usable.

The problem is that Canon made some kind of foam bumper or light seal out of a material that deteriorates into a sticky black tar with age. Now, at 20 years old or whatever, my new-to-me used 10S is shedding this tar onto the shutter curtains and they stick a lot of the time, resulting in half-blank shots.

If you open up the rear of the camera (assuming you're buying from a shop and not on ebay) you can look at the curtains to see if they have little spots of black tar on them or not. If the camera hasn't been fired in a long time it might have the problem, but may not be visible on the curtains yet. You can look for it by putting the camera on high speed / multi-shot mode and firing the shutter 30 or 40 times. This always results in more gunk appearing on my 10s (even after I clean it off with an ear-swab and methanol). It only takes a tiny little bit for the curtains to misfire, so if you see even one little black spot, you've got the problem.

I know this is an issue with the 10S and 600-series EOS cameras, I'm not sure about the 800 or the 1000.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=eos+gunk+shutter&btnG=Search

Joined: 16 Jun 2005 Posts: 51 Location: Liverpool, England

Many thanks for the info!!