Eye Controlled Focus

[pladelfe]

The last two Canon film cameras I owned, an Elan ii and EOS 3, had eye controlled focus. There were a limited number of focus points in the viewfinder but each camera reliably focused at the point nearest to where I was looking. It was a wonderful feature and I always wondered why Canon did not include it on their DSLRs. Now I know.

The new Canon R5 and R6 have all the features I could want in a camera except for eye controlled focus. When the R3 was announced, I was willing to pay considerably more to have a camera that included this feature. The first R3 I obtained would calibrate in both orientations but the focus point meandered around the field-of-view irrespective of where I was looking. Furthermore, when I pressed the focus button, the camera would focus somewhere other than where the focus indicator was. Returning that body, I obtained another which would calibrate in the horizontal orientation but not the vertical. I returned that one and will buy an R6 at less than half the price.

By the way, I do not wear glasses or contact lenses.

It is evident to me that the Canon engineering staff has forgotten how to design and manufacture the eye control system. My question to the community is "Has anyone out there had success using this feature on the R3?"

[Tronhard]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Sorry to learn  you have had such a tough time with eye AF.  Ironically, the cameras you said work for you have been given much less praise than the newest iteration of Eye AF from the sources I have monitored.

I don't use the eye control autofocus system myself, but colleagues who do have said that it works, but can require quite a bit of configuration, especially if one has certain eye conditions - and I'm not referring to contacts or glasses here.   However, once they have got the variations in light sorted, for them it has worked very well.  They did say you have to have your eye well pressed against the viewfinder.

Also, there have been a couple of updates to the firmware, have you got the latest firmware on you camera?