Actually, back in the late 1980s, early 1990s Canon briefly offered a very good adapter that allowed use of FD/FL mount lenses on EOS cameras. Those adapters used used high quality optics to correct for infinity focus, although that caused them to act as a 1.26X teleconverter and made them pretty expensive at the time. They didn't sell a lot of them, so those original adapters are now extremely rare and highly collectible. If you can find one, they typically sell for around $1200.
Since they haven't made FD/FL mount lenses for 30+ years now, I rather doubt Canon has any plans to make a new adapter.
Affordable and available third party FD to EF adapters are either the glassless type (with which lens can no longer focus to infinity, may only be usable for macro) OR use cheap optics to correct for infinity focus (which tend to ruin the image quality of the lens in the process).
Another possibility, Google for a guy named Ed Mika who makes replacement bayonet mounts for SOME FD/FL lenses that allows them to be fully used on EF-mount EOS cameras. In most cases this requires a reversible modification of the lens... removing the old mount, installing the new one. This is not possible or practical with ALL FD/FL lenses. His website lists those that are possible and the cost is about $100 per lens, if I recall correctly.
The problem is that the Canon FD/FL lens mount uses a 42mm "lens register". This is the distance from the flange of the bayonet mount to the film plane of the camera. It's the distance at which the lenses are designed to back focus the image. The EOS/EF mount uses 44mm register... which means there is no room for a simple, glassless adapter.
An alternative is to use a mirrorless camera such as Canon's M-series. Those have a very short lens register (about 18mm, if memory serves). Compared to the register of FD/FL (42mm - 18mm), this allows around 24mm (a little under 1")...PLENTY of room for adapters without need for optics.
In addition, the M-series camera electronic viewfinders have a feature called "focus peaking" which is very helpful with manual focus. The optical viewfinders of the DSLRs do not have that and are designed with auto focus in mind, don't have any of the manual focus assist features that your old AE-1 had. (It is possible to use DSLR's Focus Confirmation with MF lenses, though.)
I'm sorry Ken, but if you'd asked before buying, you would have had choice to....
1. Buy a different camera that CAN handle adapted vintage lenses.
2. Bought a camera in kit with modern lenses that will work on it.
3. Decide if one or the other of the existing types of adapters might be adequate, with their various limitations.
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Alan Myers
San Jose, Calif., USA
"Walk softly and carry a big lens."
GEAR: 5DII, 7DII (x2), 7D(x2) some other cameras, various lenses & accessories
FLICKR & ZENFOLIO
