corryhully Loc: liverpool uk

Just bought an eos 3 35mm today. Lovely camera but most amazing
thing is that it can be set up to focus on whatever focussing point
you are looking at. The camera watches your eye movement.
I had seen this on the eos 5 but nothing of the standard on the 3.

I had used a pair of binoculars 30 plus years ago(military)

corryhully Loc: liverpool uk

It is surprising this technology has been continued into
dslr cameras , or have I just not seen them?

imagemeister Loc: mid east Florida

It remains one of the great Canon mysteries as to why eye control was not continued ! ?

Darkroom317 Loc: Mishawaka, IN

Inconsistency of usability it looks like

http://www.apug.org/forums/forum52/73753-canon-1v-vs-canon-eos-3-a-2.html

OddJobber Loc: Portland, OR

I believe improvements in auto focus made it more reliable than eye control.

AzPicLady Loc: Behind the camera!

I used cameras with eye control for years. It was MOST reliable. It was extremely fast. In my DSLRs without it I struggle to achieve focus, and particularly when shooting on the fly. I have begged and begged Canon to make it available. It has fallen on deaf ears, of course.

fantom Loc: Colorado

I agree and think its redundancy may be one of the reasons it is no longer provided.
I am not completely positive but I seem to remember that once focus was achieved you could not depress the shutter button half way to lock it into place. The focus would potentially change as your eye looked somewhere else.

The dslr's allow you to set focus and lock it in place and then reposition the focus point---which in my opinion makes the eye focus somewhat unnecessary. Also since you can set any one of a multitude of focus points it makes the eye focus partially redundant It was a great feature for film cameras and in some circumstances might be good for dslr use but it is not requested by an overwhelming number of users.

corryhully Loc: liverpool uk

[quote=fantom]I agree and think its redundancy may be one of the reasons it is no longer provided.
I am not completely positive but I seem to remember that once focus was achieved you could not depress the shutter button half way to lock it into place. The focus would potentially change as your eye looked somewhere else.

The dslr's allow you to set focus and lock it in place and then reposition the focus point---which in my opinion makes the eye focus somewhat unnecessary. Also since you can set any one of a multitude of focus points it makes the eye focus partially redundant It was a great feature for film cameras and in some circumstances might be good for dslr use but it is not requested by an overwhelming number of user

i think i am more along the lines of thinking that it was probably too expensive.
as for locking focus in place, i use bbf pretty much all the time on cameras that allow it. eye control on the 3 can also be used with bbf. so no problem locking focus.

corryhully Loc: liverpool uk

the first time i saw this technology was on a pair of military binoculars about 30+ years ago.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I used a pair of EOS-3 and an Elan 7E (EOS-33, if memory serves) with Eye Control... Briefly.

After several months trying to make it work, I turned it off and never used it again.

I think the problem I had with Eye Control was that I tend to look all around the viewfinder when I'm composing a picture, not only at the subject I want to focus upon. I'm also thinking about and looking at the background, foreground, and any other objects in the image area, besides the primary subject. Sometimes I am not even looking directly at the subject when I trip the shutter. As a result, I missed focus on more images than I liked. All those problems went away and I had a higher percentage of in-focus shots without E.C.

I know some other folks managed to make it work pretty well. And a lot of people who have never used it think it sounds really cool (I did too) and have wished Canon would bring it back in new models. But my answer as to why Canon discontinued Eye Control would have to simply be that it didn't work particularly well.

The EOS-3 are great cameras even with Eye Control turned off. They got the same 45-point AF used in the 1V... and many later 1D-series models. Another thing EOS-3 inherited from the more high-end models is AF-linked Spot Metering. They aren't limited to Spot Metering only the center of the image, the way most other Canon are. Like the 1V and 1D-series that use the same AF and metering system, you can enable Spot Metering a bunch of places around the image area, following the active AF point. If memory serves, you have to reduce to using 11 or 13 AF points (instead of the full 45) to do this, but it is a really nice feature that I wish more recent cameras had. Evaluative Metering comes close with the extra emphasis it puts on the active AF point, but isn't quite the same.

The Elan 7E was one of the quietest 35mm cameras anyone ever made. It rivaled Leica rangefinders, which is pretty high praise for an SLR.