Canon R5 II Eye Control Focus on the R5II

[Jake Shoots Birds]

There's been a bit of commenting about how well or even if the eye control focus works in the R5II in various blogs, with the PetaPixel folks seeming to be the most vocal about just not being able to get it to work. After watching Jeff Cable talk about how well it worked for him in both the R1 and R5II at the Olympics, I decided to see if I could get it to calibrate for me, and if so, see how well it worked.

I had no issues with it calibrating on the first try, but did a "refine" cycle just to do it. Afterward I found that it worked extremely well as I would frame a long lens so that I had multiple things at multiple distances (mailboxes, trees, homes) and the camera would almost always focus on the thing I was looking at. Only a couple times did it not focus, and in those cases it likely had to do with me looking at a particular area of the object and not the center (back of mailbox wouldn't focus but if I looked at the center I could then get it to focus on the back). I find the yellow target ring slightly unnerving, but I suspect you can get used to it if you know you have it on.

I'll likely have this on in my C2 and/or C3 preset (C1 is pre-burst until they get a button so I'm thinking C2 is both eye focus and pre-burst, and C3 will be just eye focus). Anyone else here try and calibrate this on theirs? If so, how did it go?

 

[Matulaitis]

My experience with the eye control has been good on the R5 MK II; not so good on the R3. I wear progressive eyeglasses. I gave up on it with the R3, but am now using it quite successfully with the R5 MK II. Have calibrated and refined a few times.

It is important that when using you hold your eye fairly square to the camera, not with the camera skewed away; this has bitten me a couple of times until I realized what was going on (camera and long lens on a monopod, turn it to one side, often end up not square to the camera...

 

[KEN_A]

I've not had a lot of success with the eye tracking as yet. I have carried out calibration several times with increasing amounts of refinement. It just seems so sensitive even when I set the max negative sensitivity. My main problem is getting up to the top of the frame. I have set the dioptic for my eye first as I've never got on well with viewfinders when wearing my glasses. I shall persevere though, but not sure if it's all that an advantageous method to set the focus area.