The Canon AT-1 is a 35mm

135 film

The term 135 was introduced by Kodak in 1934 as a designation for cartridge film wide, specifically for still photography. It quickly grew in popularity, surpassing 120 film by the late 1960s to become the most popular photographic film format...

 FD-mount

Canon FD

The Canon FD lens mount is a physical standard for connecting a photographic lens to a single-lens reflex camera body. The standard was developed by Canon of Japan and was introduced in March 1971 with the Canon F-1 camera. It was the primary Canon SLR lens mounting system until 1987 when the...

 single-lens reflex camera

Camera

A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...

 manufactured by Canon

Canon Inc.

is a Japanese multinational corporation that specialises in the manufacture of imaging and optical products, including cameras, camcorders, photocopiers, steppers and computer printers. Its headquarters are located in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan.-Origins:...

 of Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 from December 1976. It was produced purely for export and was never sold in the home Japanese market. It was a version of the popular AE-1

Canon AE-1

The Canon AE-1 is a 35 mm single-lens reflex film camera for use with interchangeable lenses. It was manufactured by Canon Camera K. K. in Japan from April 1976 to 1984. It uses an electronically controlled, electromagnet horizontal cloth focal plane shutter, with a speed range of 2 to 1/1000...

 but without the shutter-speed priority auto-exposure mode of that camera. The AT-1 featured manual exposure only. This made the camera cheaper, as some consumers did not desire or require autoexposure and did not want to pay for it.

A light meter was included, featuring TTL center-weighted average metering with a CdS photocell, and a match needle in the viewfinder

Viewfinder

In photography, a viewfinder is what the photographer looks through to compose, and in many cases to focus, the picture. Most viewfinders are separate, and suffer parallax, while the single-lens reflex camera lets the viewfinder use the main optical system. Viewfinders are used in many cameras of...

.

The accessories produced for the AE-1 also worked for the AT-1, including motor drives.