eye control AF

[Paolo Piazza]

can anybody tell me something about the eye control AF?

[Ben_Sadd]

Paolo,

Eye control AF was something that was on a couple of the eos canon film cameras. The idea was that the movement of the photographer's eye-ball is tracked and then the AF point shifted accordingly to the area in the frame the photographer is looking at. I never experienced it personally, but heard that there were reliability issues and in many circumstances simply not practical.

[Chris Ober]

It's an older technology Canon had in a few of their film bodies but never made it to the digital or pro film bodies.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Paolo, I used to own eos elan 2e and later on the eos elan 7e....both had this feature. I used to love it. I never did AI servo back then but with One-shot AF on steady subject, it worked very well for me. At least in good light. You just look through whichever AF point you want to use and the camera would use that point.There was a calibration step involved....two actually..one for horizontal and one for vertical. One could also store calibrations for different persons. I used to have one for naked eye and one for 'with glasses'. I think EOS-3 used to have it too....but not sure how good it was with 45 points that were so close to each other.

I miss it a lot on the DSLRs. It was way quicker and easier than using the joystick to choose AF point. I used read back then too that people did not find it reliable....but my personal experience was quite the opposite. But back then, I did not do any action or low light stuff. My guess is there were situations in which it was not reliable plus as usual, user error of not calibrating it properly, not looking exactly through the AF point, strong sunlight into the viewfinder....other such factors.

My 2 cents.

[Cliff Beittel]

It didn't work for everyone, but for those for whom it did, there has never been a better way to focus some subjects than the eye-control AF on the EOS-3 (an $800 camera). The perfect situation: a bird perched or standing, but not still. Say the bird is facing left. You frame, look at the eye, and shoot. Then the bird hops at bit, facing right, the point of focus now maybe six inches from where it was. You reframe, look at the eye, and shoot, the new framing and focus obtained in maybe a second. And because you can do this set to AI Servo AF, any small change in the bird's position is handled automatically. Without eye control, using the center point on AI Servo is just as quick, but you lose control of framing, a big problem if the subject is large in the frame. Framing and refocusing with one-shot AF solves the framing problem, but doesn't cover small changes in position--even a quarter-inch shift front or back will ruin the shot. I think Canon really dropped the ball by discontinuing eye control rather than perfecting it.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

agree 100% with Cliff. I love to shoot swimming ducks at close range. In those situations, you have to use AI Servo, compose in camera, cannot do focus-recompose and cannot put the center point on the eye. And swimming ducks, especially when very close to the shore, always change their angles. One has to quickly change AF points when the duck does a 180-deg turn. With the joystick way in DLSR, I have missed the perfect head angle many times as I am in the process of changing the Af point. I always miss eye-control AF point selection in those situations. Same with egrets/ herons who quickly switch to a look-back pose when trying to find the prey in shallow water.

So yes, there is still something in film cameras that is better than today's advanced DSLRs :-)