Photography: Canon F-1n Camera System

Canon has produced several versions of the F-1 over a period of about 20 years. The different versions of these cameras can be found here on this page. Although different all cameras were marked F-1 on the camerabody. Besides these true versions, Canon has also produced some F-1's for special occaissions such as the Olympic games. These cameras are normal standard cameras, only fitted with some extra (gold) lettering and logos. (F-1 1976 Montreal, 1980 Lake Placed and F-1new 1984 Los Angeles)

This is the original F-1 camera as introduced in 1971. In fact there were even two versions of this camera. The ones with serialnumbers lower than 200.000 had to be modified by Canon to accept a motordrive. The latter ones were already modified.

In 1976 an improved version of the original F-1 was introduced. This camera was called the F-1n, although it only bears the name F-1 on the body. This name might sometime cause confusement with the later introduced all new F-1new.

It is very hard to see the (13 in total) differences with the original F-1 camera. Differences are the transport lever. In the original all metal, the new version it is metal with a plastic covering at the end. The stroke was reduced from 180° to 139°.

The film speed range in this new version was increased to 3200 ISO (instead of the old version's 200 ISO) Also the new version has a small holder on the backside, to hold the top of the filmbox.

In 1978 a limited series of only 2000 of these cameras were produced in olive green color, instead of the normal black.

This is the basic version of the F-1new as introduced in 1980 with the standard FN viewfinder. With this viewfinder the camera operates in manual mode just as the older F-1 models.

With motordrive or winder attached it can also operate in Shutter Priority automatic mode.

The F-1 seen on the right is fitted with the AE viewfinder. This enabled the camera with two systems; manual and aperture priority. In Aperture Priority mode the fastest shutterspeed was 1/1000th sec.

With motordrive or winder attached it can also operate in Shutter Priority automatic mode. So a camera with both motor and AE finder has all three modes available.

Seen here is a special very high speed version of the F-1new. This camera was built only in very small numbers for mostly scientific work. It has been used by some sports photographers as well.

The camera was equipped with a fixed pellicle mirror. It can operate in three motordrive speed modes, the highest is capable of 14 fps.

The power pack can be attached to the camera bottom or detached and used separately. The camera requires two dedicated power packs (totaling 24 V) housing ten 1.2 V size-AA Ni-Cd batteries.