Canon R7 R7 Frustrations

[Mel H]

I had been getting to know my r7 but am feeling a little frustrated over the auto focus. I tried some birds and only got say 2 shots before is lost focus, I took some advice and tweaked the settings, and put it down to the fact that the birds were small and very fast. I tried it on horses, slower and much bigger, but with animal I’d and tracking on , it was still losing focus, not locking on and keeping sharp - see 2 consecutive horse shots attached. I thought that maybe because there was both a person and an animal it was getting confused on where to focus. Today I tried it with some caterpillars in the garden and still got the loss of focus, I took off the animal ID and the tracking and set the focus point to the centre single point , it improved it a bit, but not that much. I hope it is something I am not doing, or a setting I have got wrong, the manual is not that helpful at all. Any comments , thoughts or advice would be welcome . Taken with canon lens using the adaptor

 

[Mel H]

Last time I had an issue I couldn’t figure out, I called Canon. The support rep had me save my settings to an SD card, remove it, put in another an format it. Then, she had me reset all settings to factory defaults. Then, we went through changing things until we found the setting that was causing the issue. Maybe doing something similar will help you see if your settings are causing the issue.

Oh thanks, that sounds like a god plan .

 

[Mel H]

So I went to the Photography Show and spoke to the Canon technical team. They said they have not had a great deal of ti e to field test the camera and suggested it might be the settings, they re set the settings to case one, but there was limited chance to test it at the show, even though I offered to run up and down I front of the stand I then went to the Canon training are and spoke with Nina Bailey who is the technical editor of EOS Magazine. She has done some testing nd the first thing she said was that the camera animal tracking does not lock on to horses very well! That when doing equestrian shots the people tracking should be used. She also said that all the setting have to be right as they work together and if one is out of balance it has a big impact on performance. So it may be the issue I had was a settings one , I m going to try and join one of their training days on the r7 , I find the camera manual quite poor in the settings explanations. The other advice was to do more testing, but take a screen shot of the settings each time and then if the problem persists then contact Canon help and send them the data.

 

[ctitanic]

The R7 AF get easily distracted by anything in the background or foreground. I would advise to test the different Servo Auto Focus cases.

https://cam.start.canon/en/C005/manual/html/UG-05_AF-Drive_0110.html

I personally like cases 2 and 4.

 

[Mel H]

I got off on the wrong foot with my R7 . After much discussion with canon support and the retailer I have concluded a few things.
1.the electronic shutter is prone to difficuties, there is distortion, banding, and it looks to lose the focus and tracking very easily. This makes the electronic shutter of very little use to me , more and more users are highlighting the roller shutter issues.
2. The adaptor that came with the body works, but there is loss of performance , despite the advertisement claiming no loss. Canon support corroborated my points in that some of the ef lens were slow to focus, including the ef 70-200 f2.8 . The age of the lens was floated as an explanation. The performance with a Tamron 150-600 F5-6.3 was very slow to focus, taking some few seconds and often hunting for focus. Canon support would not comment on non canon lens which is fair enough.
3. The focus tracking is quite intermittent with some animals. Horses are a particular issue for some reason, this was confirmed with a canon rep, this is a bit unfortunate for me as I am predominantly an equestrian photographer. Perhaps this will improve with future updates.

I have swapped to using the mechanical shutter and am now using a lens designed for the camera. The results with this set up are a lot better . I am still testing and am working with a canon rep to identify the optimum settings for my photo style. There is still the occasional loss of focus and random movement of the selected af area which I hope to pin down at the next session. I am starting to feel a little better about the r7 but absolutely believe that canon have over egged the hype and have been overly complimentary about its abilities .