ANIMAL EYE AUTO FOCUS - Best thing since sliced bread!

[Richard Crowe]

Sony has just released the firmware upgrade 2,0 for their recently released A6400 APSC Mirrorless Camera.  This introduced Full Time Animal Eye-AF to this camera.  A recent firmware update for their A7iii Mirrorless camera also brought Full Time Animal Eye-AF to that camera.

I just love the Animal Eye AF...  Do I ABSOLUTELY NEED IT?  Heck no but, it does make my dog portraiture easier and faster and it does a great job.

The above shot of little Robin was done with my A6400 Firmware 2.0 using an FE 70-200mm f/4.0 G OSS lens wide open at 71mm...

Using AF on most cameras, the auto focus tries to select the nose of the dog since the nose is closest to the camera; this is definitely true with long nosed dogs like our doodles..  You need to tell the camera that you want it to focus on the eyes.  However with Full Time Animal Eye-AF, the camera automatically selects the eyes to focus on - just like magic!

A slight downside is that you cannot use animal Eye-AF and human Eye-AF at the same time.  Also, you cannot select which eye of the animal to focus on like you can with humans.  However it does select the closest eye to the camera which is what most photographers want anyway...

The A6400 Eye AF works well even in fairly dim light conditions like this shot of my Terrier under my computer desk.  A6400 with 70-200mm f/4 lens using ISO 6400 at 200mm.  f/4 at 1/80 second...