CANON VS SONY A7III

[Loswr]

Is this a good spot for me to admit my stupidity? I’ve been reading here about eye autofocus, and it sounded like a neat feature. Instead of choosing a focus point or tapping on the subject on the screen, you could just look at something in the viewfinder, and the camera would see what you are looking at and focus on that. I understood why people would want a camera that would do that.

Sadly, my further reading here suggests that is not what the feature does. I’m disillusioned.

You're referring to eye-controlled AF, which was a Canon feature in the film days. I'm not sure how effective it would be with the number of AF points in today's cameras.

 

[bwud]

Is this a good spot for me to admit my stupidity? I’ve been reading here about eye autofocus, and it sounded like a neat feature. Instead of choosing a focus point or tapping on the subject on the screen, you could just look at something in the viewfinder, and the camera would see what you are looking at and focus on that. I understood why people would want a camera that would do that.

Sadly, my further reading here suggests that is not what the feature does. I’m disillusioned.

You're referring to eye-controlled AF, which was a Canon feature in the film days. I'm not sure how effective it would be with the number of AF points in today's cameras.

I don’t find it particularly effective with my Elan 7NE (primary film camera). In fact, i find it unpredictable. I expect they could do it better today, but not if one wants to select one of hundreds of discrete AF locations. Rather it would work for “somewhere over here.”

 

[dak723]

If you refer to the A7III review on Dpreview, you can see within the same type of tests, the A7III outperforms the 6DII on all fronts including autofocus tracking (even with the 6DII's DPAF). ....

The A7M3 has much better autofocus TRACKING of certain subjects like human faces. There are some cool features like face registration and face preference, and of course, Eye AF is great for human subjects in well-lit conditions. But it is TERRIBLE in comparison to the 6DII in:

- Raw autofocus speed in good conditions
- Raw autofocus speed in dimly lit conditions
- Autofocus in very poor lighting where an AF illuminator is needed -- is excellent in 6DII and unusable in Sony
- Accuracy of spot selection in PDAF mode (the Sony is good for choosing the right point in accurate focus-magnified Autofocus in Contrast Detect mode, but then it's painfully slow)
- Continuous autofocus of a small subject by manually tracking it (such as a bird)
- Autofocus hunting in non-continuous AF modes
- Autofocus at smaller apertures (where the Sony uses crappy, stopped down autofocusing)

To me, every cool feature in the A7M3 is dwarfed by relatively poor autofocus. 20 steps of DR does nothing for me if my bird is blurry.

And this is why people, whenever possible, should try out cameras for themselves. Even if you think DPR (or anyone else) doesn't bring their biases to the table- or even if they don't do it intentionally - their tests are not your tests. In their test, the Sony is more capable, in Talys's ACTUAL USE, the 6D II has far more capable AF.

This is not to say that the Sony isn't going to be the best choice for some folks. If DR is of great importance and your shooting depends on needing more, than the Sony sensor, in both testing and people's experience, is more capable when it comes to DR. But some of the most important reasons a camera might be considered capable aren't tested (and, yes, some are subjective). Things like reliability, ergonomics and ease of use, weather sealing, exposure accuracy and color.

While not a Sony or Canon, I recently talked to a photographer shooting our company photos with a Nikon D750 - a camera often mentioned here on CR. He'd had it for a year, he said, and liked it...aside from the fact that he'd had to have it in for repairs three times already! So, reliability matters - perhaps most of all!