> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Tom Pfeiffer > Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2001 7:58 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: EOS Elan IIe vs. 7e > > I guess Canon changed this setup on me. On my IX, the white light at that > location (on the body, not on the flash) is the AF assist AND Red-Eye > Reduction. So then the 7/7e actually flickers the flash tube for > AF assist? > I wonder why they changed? Perhaps to allow a better clearance for large > lenses, I can see being on the flash head it would be a little higher. This is my question. I assume it is both, because when I tried the camera in the store, to the best of my recollection the light flickered even though the flash was not engaged -- or was it? If this blankety-blank light is only for red-eye reduction, then the camera is even more useless to me than I had thought. Canon has really messed this one up. Not only is there a bad a/f assist light, the e.v. range goes down only to one rather than the zero of the II. How could they do this? BTW, with all the sanctimony about real photographers not needing a/f assist, it occurs to me that of all the automated features, i.e. autowind, DX coding, and various forms of autoexposure, the one most valuable to all photographers, including even professionals, is autofocus. I would love to have a camera with a highly developed a/f system for focusing in all light situations and lenses, plus really good and quick m/f capability but with a semi-automatic exposure control system -- such as match-needle with spot focus. Exposure is really much more complicated than focusing and in many cases requires much more intelligent judgement from the photographer. With focus, you just have to determine where to focus and then focus on that point. The one difficult problem is when the plane of focus you want does not have a physical object to focus on. But these problems could also be handled easily (and are to a large extent, but not perfectly) by Canon. They just need to get the low light focusing situation taken care of. I say this after having taken some workshops a couple of years ago, where the instructor encouraged us to use strictly manual exposure control for available light photography, so we could hone our exposure evaluation skills and really pick the right exposure for each shot. It was fascinating to experience one's sense of light and shadow values, contrast and so on, becoming more and more refined every day when Iturned off the a/e and started really looking. My powers of dead exposure reckoning also improved. BUT, on the other hand, the instructor said, if you have autofocus, for heaven's sake use it. There is no enhancing of one's photographer sensibilities to be gained by fiddling with focus controls. So he was a firm advocate of manual exposure control and autofocus. The point of all my campaigning in these threads has been that a/f, as far as it has gone, still needs more thought by the designers, to make it a better tool in the hands of the photographer. It should be quick, silent, easy to select the desired focus plane, and it should work in as wide a range of lighting and lens speed conditions as possible. A/f, even more than a/e should be really as transparent as possible to the photographer, whereas exposure control needs to be more within the photographer's consciousness. To be sure, the switching between automatic and semi-automatic exposure control, including the ease of making minor adjustments to shutter and aperture settings, can also be improved, and one hopes that these will progress before the film SLR becomes a museum piece, but at least one could hope that Canon will reverse this backward evolution in autofocus that they introduced in going from the Elan II to the Elan 7 (in spite of all the really excellent improvements they put into that camera). ---------------------------------------------- Gerry Palo Denver, Colorado * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
