Canon EOS 30 (not D)

It is surprising that I haven’t written about the Canon EOS 30 before, mainly as it is almost certainly the film camera that I use most often. Same goes for the 40mm pictured on it. The camera was released by Canon in 2000, so was towards the end of the film EOS line. It was also known as the Elan 7 in the US or EOS 7 in Japan. Why we just can’t have the same name worldwide who knows – after all what we called Marathon became Snickers and Opal Fruits became Starburst and we all survived!

Over the years I’ve owned many film EOS (and a few digital too), certainly a 750, that was stolen on a night train, 1000f, 1000fn, 5, 50E, 500, 500n, – they seem to come and go but this one has stayed longest. For speed it offers up to 4 FPS, more than enough for my use. Shutter speeds are from 30 seconds to 1/4000 sec (in half steps) and bulb. It offers very accurate exposure with it’s 35 zone metering system and offers full manual, aperture priority, shutter priority, and programme, as well as the EOS favourite that I call “green panic mode!”

There are also the picture modes, seen on the command dial, Portrait, Landscape, Macro, Sports and Night. I’ve yet to use them. I tend to use the camera mostly on aperture priority, as I want to decide what aperture to use, which by default is also changes the shutter speed!

It hosts other features too, that equally I don’t use or need, like double exposure, auto bracketing, depth of focus mode, continuous drive, and date facility. Eye calibration is left off, as is AI focus, and AI servo focus, it’s just too much fuss!

What is useful here on the back door is the rewind before film end button, and the FUNCtion button, which lets you select amongst other things a manual setting for ISO, if you wish not to follow the box or DX, or indeed if your film doesn’t have DX coding (Foma200).

What is brilliant is the 7 point auto focus, it seems to always be spot on! What is also becoming a critical feature for me – it features a built in eye correction dioptre. I can actually see what’s going on! It helps that it also has a huge viewfinder which has coverage of 90% vertical and 92% horizontal apparently, with magnification of 0.7x in Leica speak. It’s this that makes it my main “go to” 35mm camera these days.

You can see some images made with mine here: https://andysphotoblog.org/2021/08/05/canon-eos-30-and-ilford-delta-400/