Traduction de Sylvain Halgand

Canon AE-1 marked its time and a whole generation of photo hobbyists of which I am. The sight of this camera in the catalogs left me dreamer and I guided hundreds of tourists ornithologists to be able to buy it (and still the last hundreds of francs had to leave the parental pockets).
One 300, then one 400 mm (but not Canon these) associated with the camera filled my leisures, to run after all that flew. A large flash Vivitar 283 (another best-seller of the time), a stick and a winder supplemented the panoply. A few years later, having sold some photographs, Canon AE-1 became the second camera, the first being the Canon A-1 (which I regret such an amount of having sold).

Canon AE-1 was a speed priority, thing quite practical to seize the birds. This speed priority , easy to use for the amateurs made much in his success. The control of exposure was made by a central processing unit (the first computer of my life!) exact description in the instructions is “central treatment unit comprising two integrated circuits and a LSI circuit equipped with a I2L (circuit of logic integrated into direct injection of carriers).

In the finder, there were a rangefinder with coincidence/microprisms. At the beginning, I missed lot of by photographs to try to restore the broken lines. When the line became continuous, it was too late, it did not have there more subject to photograph. A needle indicated on a scale of apertures, that calculated by the LSI thingamagic.In top of this scale, there was a red zone to indicate the over-exposure. A diode located at the bottom of the scale started to flicker in the event of under-exposure or to indicate that selected speed was out of the field of coupling taking into account the sensitivity of film. A M started to flicker since the lens was positioned in manual mode. The body was motorisable, up to 2 images/second.

The black version of the camera is less current than the metallized version, because the purchase the black was much more expensive.
The AE-1 had a phratry and a cousin. AT1 (1977) did not have the automatic control of exposure, the AV-1 (1979) was a simplified version. A-1 (1978) was the large-brother, multi-priorities, perfect. The cousin was the AE-1 program, wire of A-1. The functions of A-1 are supplemented by a mode Program (which I always hated) where the camera live its life.