Canon FD Lenses

Canon manual-focus SLR mount, 1971-1980s | 35 mm film

Canon FD evolved from the earlier R and FL SLR lineage into the company's main manual-focus system. Introduced with the F-1 and FTb generation, it added fully coupled open-aperture metering and automatic diaphragm operation while keeping a mechanical breech-lock heritage. Later New FD lenses removed the separate chrome locking ring and handled more like bayonet lenses, but the mount still depended on mechanical aperture and metering linkages.

FD is optically important because it spans Canon's most ambitious pre-EOS lens design period: fast standards, compact wide angles, fluorite and aspherical telephotos, macro lenses, and early special-purpose optics. The system also includes transitional curiosities such as FD autofocus attempts and high-end L-series lenses before Canon reset its autofocus strategy.

Its mechanical interface became a dead end once Canon moved to fully electronic EF in 1987, so FD never gained native continuity into the autofocus SLR era. That makes the FD pages useful as a self-contained view of Canon's manual-focus optical engineering rather than as a direct ancestor with body compatibility.