Strangely, Canon didn’t launch their all new EOS line of 35mm film SLR’s with a top end professional model. Instead, they chose to break ground with the “enthusiasts level” EOS 650 and then very quickly followed this up for “higher end” enthusiasts with the 620 and 600. This apparently saw the beginning of Canon’s habit of counting backwards with their model numbers as the cameras got better.
The EOS 600 was an extremely well built camera with an excellent specification – early adopters must’ve been really quite satisfied with their purchase. With the benefit of hindsight its easy to see just how quickly things advanced when only a few months later the monumental EOS 1 launched and showed what Canon were really aiming for. In retrospect, the performance of the EOS 600 was good, I pitched it against the Nikon 401s some time back and liked it – despite preferring the Nikon in a straight head to head. There was definitely room for improvement.
Meanwhile in 1990, Minolta were absolutely smashing it in the AF SLR market with the 7000i having launched at the same time as the 600 – a model which felt very much like a vision of the future. Minolta were hell bent on packing as much technology as possible into their cameras and had all kinds of tricks up their sleeves, none more prevalent than their innovative expansion card system that jumped firmly on the computers and microchips with everything hype-bandwagon of the late 80’s and early 90s.
Canon had to compete and do so quickly. Not only were they already playing catchup with auto focus having been firmly beaten to it by Minolta, they were starting to look quite pedestrian in terms of technology, features and ergonomics. Having played Tetris with their product range, Canon decided to shoehorn a new model between their all out professional EOS 1 and their “good enough for 99% of people” 600 – and so the EOS 10 was born.
In this post:
- Buying an EOS 10
- Serious camera specs
- Unexpected camera in bagging area
- Is it better than a £1 EOS 300?
- Conclusions and learning
Buying an EOS 10
Things were really weird in 1990 if you wanted to buy a camera. Auto focus bodies had certainly convinced the masses, but manual focus cameras continued to be produced and sold alongside to those who refused to be persuaded by this new wave of computer controlled, auto everything SLR technology. If you took price as an indication of quality (as many consumers do) and ranked cameras in order, you’d find the following in April 1990:
- Canon EOS 1 – £900
- Canon F1 – £770
- Canon T90 – £415
- Canon EOS 10 – £400
- Canon EOS 600 – £350
- Canon EOS 700 – £329
There were some real decisions to be made there. The EOS 700 is a hideous camera, why anyone bought one is beyond me. For £20 more you could have the infinitely better 600 or for exactly the same money a 650 with a lens. But where things get really odd is at the top end – between the EOS 1 and 10 are two manual focus SLR’s still being sold at very high prices. Bear in mind, even the latest iteration of the F1 was a decade old at that point. Such was the strength of conviction that electronics were designed to fail, Canon could still sell the 95% mechanical F1 to people who were serious about never, ever allowing a camera to let them down. The T90 was a beautiful camera, but was it as good as an EOS 10 by mid 1990? That’s an interesting point to come back to later.
Considering the high end nature of the EOS 10, a camera that cost the equivalent of £971 adjusted for inflation as of April 2025, you might expect that second hand prices are strong. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for reasons we’ve discussed in Ravioli land many times, no one seems to want these older EOS bodies and as such they’re selling for next to nothing. Indeed, I recently advertised an Olympus PEN EE and my EOS 10 at the same time. The Olympus sold immediately, the poor EOS 10 is languishing unloved in the overflow box of cameras in the garage.
If you want to try an EOS 10 today, they’re widely available for around £20 and I’d highly recommend taking a gamble on one that is sold as not working if you’re buying from someone who is not a second hand camera retailer. I did just that and came away with a fully working copy for…. £1.75. The only problem with it was the usual sticky grip issue. Talking of issues, do look out for dark black marks on the shutter blades of these cameras, they are notorious for failing shutters because there is a bumper material underneath that degrades and, you guessed it, turns into the dreaded black goo. You can fix this, but it is an extremely delicate afternoon spent with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol.
Serious camera specs
I do love Andre’s letter. In some ways, he’s right – and we’ll come to the barcodes next, but in others he’s wrong. The EOS 10 did have 5fps continuous drive and predictive / AI auto focus so I’m not sure what his problem was there. Perhaps it’s living in Bridgwater that did for him, the smell of that place in the 1990’s was enough to drive anyone round the bend.
On to those barcodes.
I know it is hard to explain to anyone who didn’t live through this, but there was genuinely a time when barcodes were exciting and new. I wish I were joking, but I can distinctly remember a time when you’d go to the supermarket and there was not the familiar chorus of loud beeps every time an item had been scanned. The late 80’s and very early 90’s were still a time when the checkout operator would manually bash in prices that had been stuck on individual items with a pricing gun as the shelves were stacked, into their till system and then at the end you’d either pay by cheque (imagine the confusion today if someone tried to do such a thing) or by card.
When I say pay by card, the checkout assistant would then whip out this machine which looked something like a paper guillotine and proceed to sandwich your card between triplicate carbon copy paper and make an imprint of it with this giant roller. I’m off to see if I can find an image of one for you now…
Found one. It’s no wonder they used to call these things “knuckle busters” – there’s even some archive footage of them being used because of course there is.
Times really were different back then. The idea of scanning your own shopping before bopping your watch on the payment terminal and walking out was the stuff of science fiction in 1990. I can still distinctly remember the roll out of barcode equipped checkouts in supermarkets and it really was a genuine novelty for all involved. As with every introduction of new technology I daresay many also saw it as the end of their careers.
Going back to cameras, Canon had a problem to solve. Minolta had stolen the march not only with auto focus technology but expandability as well. Whilst I was dubious about the necessity of their expansion card feature, the reality is that it offered a flexible and convenient way to reconfigure your camera for a certain type of shooting environment. Canon couldn’t exactly copy the idea, the subsequent lawsuit probably wasn’t worth the hassle, but it left them with very few options when it came to releasing a camera that could be expanded in some way.
Clearly, Minolta had shown that the expandability concept worked and consumers liked it. Little did they know the foreshadowing of the future we have now where you buy a product once and then spend the rest of the product lifecycle buying endless add ons (like in game or app purchases) and subscriptions. Indeed, sadly I would not be surprised to see any of the big manufacturers release a camera now that came with some kind of dreaded subscription model attached. “Yes, it has 10 fps as standard, but if you’d like you can always upgrade to the pro-gold-platinum-ruby-diamond only £1.99 per month features that will unlock 20fps! What, you need to stop down past F8? F11 to 22 are premium apertures…”
Unexpected camera in bagging area
So, barcodes it was. You could buy the optional little barcode reader which would then reprogram your camera for a certain type of environment or image style. Compared to the Minolta expansion cards, though, this really did seem something of a pointless system.
On your Dynax 7000i you could pop in a card for “sports” or “portraits” which made it very clear what you were doing and, more to the point, how it would alter the behaviour of your camera. Sounds great, but why not just build these capabilities straight in to the camera itself? My best guess is Minolta felt their target market just wanted a really solid SLR with the four main modes – program, aperture priority, shutter priority and full manual.
Seeing this opportunity, Canon did exactly as you’d expect and made sports, portrait, landscape and so on all standard features available on the mode dial. Why did they need to put in an additional expansion feature? Honestly? I don’t know. To provide feature parity is the only reason I can think of.
The system itself is not slick or dynamic by any means. First, you crack out your book of possible shooting scenarios which ranges from “I’m inside a church and want to photo the stained glass” to various types of flash portrait. Next, get your magic scanner out and read in the barcode until you hear a single beep. Canon thought this was a difficult process and were at great pains to explain exactly how you should swipe the scanner over the code. When I tested this myself it didn’t fail once, regardless of how fast or slow I swiped over the barcode.
Now comes the tricky bit. The data is then transferred via infra-red into the receiver on the camera body, which is neatly recessed so the barcode reader sits nicely inside. You then press the button and it transmits to the camera. Only, on the first few tries, it did absolutely nothing. I read the instructions and tried again. Nothing.
Only by chance did I discover that if you firmly press the scanner in to the camera, the receiver acts as a button and once pressed in the camera recognises that you want to transfer data to it. Nowhere in the manual does it say you have to press it in like this…
The settings are then locked in to the camera and will remain there until you scan a new barcode. At this point I’ll say I’m a little dubious as to how much data transfer actually takes place between barcode reader and camera. When you click the reader in, the camera pops up the program number it thinks you’ve scanned. When you press the button on the reader it then confirms those settings.
I can’t help but think that the settings are already stored in the camera itself and all that the barcode reader does is tell the camera which program to change it to. In other words, you could’ve just enabled the control dial and scrolled through to the correct custom program rather than bugger about trying to hold a reader to your camera and press a button all at the same time. Having said that, it is of course possible to encode camera settings into a barcode – but I doubt they went to the trouble. I wonder if anyone has reverse engineered this system…
Having tried out a couple of these barcodes I quickly gave up. They’re really restrictive and there’s no deviating from the exposure settings that the camera chooses. In some, like the “white cat sat on a white chair in front of a white house” program, all it does is whack the exposure compensation up two stops. I think most photographers who could afford an EOS 10 in 1990 neither wanted nor needed this kind of assistance. There’s a reason it only ever appeared on one more camera before being quietly forgotten about.
Is it better than a £1 EOS 300?
No.
Is it better than the EOS 600?
A bit.
There are a lot of quality of life improvements on the EOS 10. I like the quieter film advance which genuinely does cut noise down significantly and I always appreciate the flashing red square to confirm which focus point is in use and when focus has been achieved, rather than the green circle at the bottom of the viewfinder on the earlier models.
Talking of AF, the performance is decent but nothing that will blow your mind. In “AI focus” mode it is nowhere near as quick as you’d like it to be at spotting that your intended subject has started moving and to engage continuous focus tracking.
If anything, this camera feels very much like a grown up version of the common-as-muck EOS 1000F and that makes sense as they launched at pretty much the same time. Both models went on to be wildly popular and share similar ergonomics and design although the EOS 10 is definitely more capable in nearly every area, but then it should’ve been for the asking price.
Conclusions and learning
Using the EOS 10 feels very much like “just another EOS camera.” Is that a good thing? Yes and no.
The EOS 10 shows the strength of Canon’s design team. Following the breakthrough that was the T90, they quickly honed a design language that worked and needed very little refinement. The ergonomics of nearly every EOS film body was pretty much spot on – yes they had a few quirks like the twisty-turny design of the EOS 700 but most of them stuck to the same winning formula.
Anyone who has used almost any of the EOS line of cameras will have no problem picking up any other and instantly feeling at home. The EOS 1, 1n and 1v require a little more learning but even then the general principles are the same. The DNA of the T90 and 1 series live on to this day, even in their digital mirrorless cameras.
In 1990, the EOS 10 was formidable. It had taken the EOS 600 and improved it in nearly every way. In retrospect, it doesn’t quite have that desirability that other models do because it simply doesn’t do anything that special. The barcode idea was novel, but totally pointless and if you remove this feature, nothing much stands out about it. The first models are novel because… they came first, the 1 series is iconic, rugged and amazing. Later models like the 50, 33 and 33v show what happens when you cram years of development into well designed bodies and the final models like the 300x and 300v are great examples of forward thinking, classic millennial design.
To excite the film photographer in 2025 I think there needs to be something either novel, groundbreaking at the time or exciting about a camera to give you the motivation or reason to seek one out and add it to your active service list. Being good “back in the day” no longer cuts it when the market is flooded with a wealth of more interesting or inspiring models to choose from.
The EOS 10 is not a bad camera, not by any stretch of the imagination. If it were the only film camera you ever owned, you’d be fine, taking great pictures and having a good time. But there’s so much better out there these days. If you’re looking for ultimate film fun on a budget, my advice has still not changed, buy an EOS 300 for £1 and off you go – it’s unbeatable. If you want cheap but not bargain basement try an EOS 50 or 33 (if you can find one at a sensible price) or, if you’ve £100 or more, treat yourself to a 1 series. I fear the EOS 10’s of this world will always be just that little bit too uninspiring.
Finally, what about that 1990 purchase decision? Stood in your local Jessops or browsing the back pages of Amateur Photographer and faced with a choice between the EOS 10 and a T90, which one would I have bought? Which one should you have bought? That would’ve been a far, far more difficult choice than you might think.
Ergonomically, the T90 wins by a mile. It also has a nicer viewfinder, runs on AA batteries and you’d have access to a world of beautiful FD manual focus lenses. The second hand market would’ve been great as well, people were offloading their manual focus gear for really tempting prices and with your T90 you could’ve accumulated quite the gear haul to compliment your purchase. Then again, if you were in the second hand market then, you could well have picked up a T90 for far less than a new EOS 10 too.
The young version of me would’ve found no contest – I’d have bought the EOS 10. Cutting edge technology was always better, right?! Why would you want any of this old stuff? Auto focus is brilliant and actually, if I’d been in to sports photography or similar, I’d have bought the EOS 10 for that too.
However, knowing what I know now, I think it surprises no one that if I were time travelling back to 1990 with £400 in my pocket, I’d likely have left the shop with a T90.
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