Yes, for sports like that TN found the D800 was superior. Though I did wonder if like DPR, he configured the auto focus in a way the manual recommended against.
Upvote
0
EOS R1 Autofocus: What Sets It Apart from the EOS R5 Mark II?
- Thread starter Richard CR
- Start date
Answering to the first paragraph of my comment, twists the meaning of my whole comment...
I was referring to the crowd (including myself) that bought an R5II and or R3 and is now looking at praise for the R1.
Upvote
0
Great write up, although I don't see this being much of an issue in real world cases. I shoot wildlife, I've used the entire 5D series, now the R5, R5II, using top notch lenses (RF 70-200/2.8, RF 600/4), with all the vertical lines the camera can grab onto, I have yet to see an issue of it missing autofocus on animals or static subjects I shoot cause it doesn't have cross type. The hit rate on animals with the R5 and R5II is really good, the R5II excels with faster moving subject as its able to keep up now due to the faster readouts.
I have yet to say when reviewing my photos, "damn that's out of focus, stupid camera didn't focus on the horizontal lines."
I have yet to say when reviewing my photos, "damn that's out of focus, stupid camera didn't focus on the horizontal lines."
Upvote
0
As I stated earlier, wildlife and nature doesn't really care about straight lines anyways.
But thinking about sports and press events, the turn suddenly tables as stadium architecture, sportswear, suits, conference stages and backdrops on said stages can have quite a lot of straight lines.
Doesn't really matter, if horizontal or vertical, as there will be quite a lot of times, where you'd want to have the camera in portrait or landscape orientation, so the problem will come up either way.
So having a press body that tackles this issue is absolutely a great thing.
Upvote
0
I'm shooting a Euroleague game on Thursday, I can't wait to see how the R1 does under great lighting and some space to move around. I'm going to be stressing the tracking the best I can.
Upvote
0
Maybe there was something wrong with your copy?
I had a pair of 5D3's and they were really good. Way better than the 5DII's that I used before. I shot everything from about 50+ UK weddings, numerous wild life and birding workshops including puffins, razorbills, gannets guilemots. This included a lot of stationary. in flight, take off and landing images. Each night wen we compared shots, often I had similar results with the 1Dx users, just less fps and less images to wade through and post produce. I did a lot of landscapes too.
Upvote
0
This is the first time anyone is suggesting that something was wrong with my copy, and it's not like I haven't mentioned my problems over the years.
Many, including myself, have suggested that the settings (or the operator) were wrong.
But this doesn't exclude the possibility that there was something wrong with it all the while.
Upvote
0
Taking emotion and bias out of the equation, it seems to me if your a professional sports or journalism photographer, you're going to select the gear that will give you best chance of getting "that shot" consistently. It also allows your editor to choose your work more often for publishing. From what I read here, it's the R1.
Upvote
0
I am yet to see great AF performance.
After the 5D4, I had R7 and AF was just crap (using L lenses and/or fast primes). Like seriously crap. Now I have the R5m2 and AF is better but I'm far from being satisfied.
Maybe it's just me and time making things nicer as they were but sometimes I got the feeling the old analogue EOS 1 and 3 bodies had better AF (not servo and the modern stuff of course).
After the 5D4, I had R7 and AF was just crap (using L lenses and/or fast primes). Like seriously crap. Now I have the R5m2 and AF is better but I'm far from being satisfied.
Maybe it's just me and time making things nicer as they were but sometimes I got the feeling the old analogue EOS 1 and 3 bodies had better AF (not servo and the modern stuff of course).
Upvote
0
Your experience differs significantly from that commonly reported. There’s probably a reason.
Upvote
0
Do not confuse focusing with tracking or subject detection.
Eye af and subject detection works by having the processor look at the image and try to find subjects it can recognise, then telling the af to acquire focus at the pixels in that specific spot, where it thinks to "see" an eye for example.
The advantage of crosstype af sensor alignment comes after, when the camera actually tries to find the phase differences between the subpixels of the selected af area.
I think we might have gone a little too far down the "horizontal lines" road, where we seem to actually talk about literal lines in the image.
It's not necessarily a line, that becomes a focusing problem, but anything where for example two neighbouring pixels pretty much see identical things. And having some pixels oriented differently, diminishes the chances of this happening, making the crosstype sensors faster and more reliable.
I hope this helps. If not please forgive me, it's late and I'm tired.
Upvote
0
…but that doesn’t stop many millions of electrons giving their lives every day, for that very purpose on forums everywhere…
Upvote
0
Last edited:
Upvote
0
I am not sure I understand this. The R5ii has more AF points than the R1 and so has more focussing pixels in any particular area. The R5ii sensor will focus with more difficulty when the changing contrast is in the vertical direction (landscape mode) but will focus better than the R1 when the contrast change is in the horizontal direction because all of the R5's detection is in that direction whereas the R1's crosspoints are only 50%. At 45 deg, they should be about the same. Where is the flaw in my reasoning?
Upvote
0
From my understanding it's the other way around (but please correct me if I'm wrong).
The R5 should be able to detect phase differences in vertical features better, as the subpixels are aligned in a way that they would see the exact same thing on a horizontal feature.
Think of the old analogue rangefinder style cameras. That's pretty much how dpaf works.
You see two images combined to one from two different angles. If the lens is out of focus, you see two images side by side that are not aligned ghosting around, so you pull focus until these images combined.
Now imagine a black line on a white piece of paper. If the line is vertical and you are not focused correctly, you see two lines, indicating a need for better focus.
If it is horizontal, you see a single horizontal line, as both your points of comparison are on the same plane (if you could see the outer edges of the line, you'd notice the edges do not align). So what do you do?
You tilt the camera until you can see the ghosting clearly, focus and tilt back.
You are absolutely right, that turning 45° can be beneficial. That's why DSLR focus sensors had horizontal, vertical and diagonal sensors on them.
And considering things like fabric, where there are basically lots of tiny squares, having those diagonal sensors can be absolutely essential.
That's pretty much why canon is for sure still working on getting quad pixel af ready.
Splitting the pixels into groups of four will allow to detect differences between two horizontal and two vertical subpixels, but also compare the diagonal pixels to each other.
Upvote
0
Irrespective of which way the detector detects, vertical or horizontal, does the crosspoint one beat out the older unidirectional one in all directions, or in just one direction and weaker in the orthogonal direction? Does the Canon patent do diagonal phase comparisons or does it do parallel and perpendicular phase detect separately? If does do diagonal it would seem to me that you are just rotating the angle of the differences.
Upvote
0
I've been a long term user of the 5D series. I owned the original 5D from it's Uk launch and I used it a lot. I bought a pair of 5DII's as soon as they were available too. I used to swap out the focus screen for the fine focus screen so i could see when my F1.2 / f1.4 glass were in out out of focus. I used to consider the central AF point to be the only reliable Af point and I honed my point, hold and re-compose technique a lot until it was 2nd nature, fast and efficient and almost instinctual. belive it or not, i actually shot some Eagle Owls in flight with this set up and the images were suprisingly good. Some are still in my portfolio. But it was hard work and took a lot of concentration and effort.
Along came the 5D3 and it's AF was vastly superior. Most of the points seemed to work better than anything I had used previously. Canon took away my safety net of the interchangeble fine focus screen. But the smallest area single dot AF seemed to be really accurate in "one shot" mode. In AF servo moe it was actually usable but it seemed less accurate. I did find that this AF accuracy was very lens specific too (even within my extensive Canon L lens collection). With the 5D3 I now had a few different AF options to choose from in my "how I shoot on Canon repertoire". I shot extensively with a pair of those cameras and probably 90% of my current portfolio was taken with this camera. My evolution as a photographer has had a lot of AF toil and technique compensation growth. I can imagine that many photographs who started tehir canon AF journey with the 5D3 (and I'm not pointing fingers or categorising you here) wont have had that learning curve.
I passed on the 5D4 and the Eos R. The 5D4 just offered me more megapixels and a bit better DR / ISO. I liked the Eos R, but it was Canon's first attempt and felt a lot like a beta version. Certainly a bit too immature as a product for me at the time.
The R5's 45mp sensor is a just a bit too dense for me and the original R6 was a bit too low.
When the R6ii was available, that was my obvious entry point.
I dipped my toe with the R8, loved it and then bought a R6ii shortly after.
The R6ii offers a lot in terms of AF functions. It's the first Canon camera where I can actually use all the AF point in servo mode to track. The Eye tracking is a game changer. However...there are times where I need a single spot focus and for the camera to focus where I spot that I pointed it. I often find that I am wrestling with the camera to stop the camera's AF wandering off. Sure I can menu dive and i ahve a lot of customised button layouts enabled...but it's really frustrating when I want to use point and re-compose.
Upvote
0
