THE CANON FD60 IN PRACTICAL USE
01.10.09 - I've been giving this puppy lots of use, so much that I actually stopped using my new 40D enough that I sold it. This was actually a really hard decision to make. On the one hand, I made $700 back to put towards various debts; on the other, I really really really wanted to cut up the 40D and try a newer, enhanced model for this mod. The way I figure though, if I'm still shooting with this beast into Summer 09, I'll start saving and looking for a new/old beaten 40D to malign into a 40FD, and possibly make this a feasible, sellable mod.

In use, some things I've found:

• There are at least two dead pixels on the sensor, but this is small potatoes.
• The mount is a little questionable, and should be better reenforced for heavier lenses.
• The camera is pretty awful in lower light. I don't know if I should chalk this up to a really early-era sensor, or a dark finder prism, or inability to focus in said low light due to the abused matte screen. You can get a low-light shot in, but some factor is too questionable. I'll put up some samples eventually and maybe someone else can make sense of it.
• The crop of the lenses must be approximately 1.5 or so, but I have no idea how you'd confirm this criteria, being that I have no other camera like this to compare to. Rough estimates comparing an XSi at 35mm and the FD at 35mm crop the FD slightly tighter, but by a pittance.
• The Canon branded lenses are a royal pain to lock on and off, which will be remedied by Dremeling the face panel down on the lens mount section.
• Exposure readings seem to be pretty accurate, when changing either the shutter speed on-camera or aperture live on-lens. The downside is that you still need to focus wide open, and then stop back down again. If I get smart enough, I'll figure out a way to make a quick-shot lever so you can easily reset the aperture after focusing, not unlike the faster-than aperture kick in an AE1.
• It's heavy, and I like it :)
• White balance and color balance are awful, and requires RAW manipulation on most shots. This is actually fine by me, as I really enjoy RAW editing with my shoddy colorblind eyes.

Anyhow, that's the current word. I'll add a little more as I figure it out, with more sample images from different lenses, and hopefully a test chart so I can show how results are skewed with different lenses.

p.s. -- the top photo includes my new favorite multi-purpose lens, a Vivitar 35-105 f3.5... this thing is huge, pretty, and weighs about 18 tons. The lower photo is the Vivitar 55mm Auto Macro f2.8, which I love dearly for it's wide aperture and boss macro focusing abilities. It was actually one of the catalysts for this whole project in the first place.