Wallace Koopmans Artlog

The Canon Elan 7ne has a very interesting feature.  It can select from its seven focus points by determining where the photographer is looking.  If your thinking in terms of modern facial recognition through processing stop right there.  It uses a more intrusive system of shining an infrared beam into your eye and using the resulting reflection to compare it to a sort of look up map you create during calibration of the system.  That’s why it works best if you make sure to delete any previous calibrations before trying to use it.  If you do calibrate the system it works quite well but feels awkward to look at the focus point you want.  I think that may be  because normally you try to take in the entire scene in the viewfinder not concentrate on one tiny spot.  The procedure for calibrating is a little involved so I will leave that to the manual, though it can be turned on and off easily with a switch on the top of the camera.  

The focus points are all near the center so for a lot of instances they will all cover the main subject which defeats the purpose of being able to select a focus point by looking at it.

The Elan 7ne was released in 2000 around the same time as the Canon 1D a 4mpixel digital SLR and although they continued to release some Small plastic ‘Rebel’ SLR’s for a few years this was pretty much the end of the line for film camera innovation as their attention turned fully to digital.