These are still just early results but I am happy to say that the tracking and eye autofocus does work with the motorless A-Mount lenses. The limitations of these lenses is the speed of the autofocus. In other words for a slow moving target like a walking human or a relatively slow moving target like a hummingbird moving in a small area around a food source like a feeder or a flower bush the camera will track the target quite well.
But when I had Camera Girl throw a ball to Larold across the lawn I couldn’t even come close to keeping him in the viewfinder. That of course is my own fault. I lack the tracking skill to keep the running dog in front of me. He’s just too damn fast for me.
But I’ll think up some better scenario to test the tracking algorithm. The other part of the test is to see whether the lens could autofocus fast enough to keep the target in focus. This has yet to be answered. I’ll look at the results today and see what I find.
Nice shots! The hummingbird particularly. We don’t have a feeder here and I’ve never managed a shot like that before. What were the setting on the shots? With the hummingbird, I’m picking up just a little chromatic noise in the background so I’m guessing a high numerical shutter priority forcing a high ISO? I shoot my A7III at ISO 12,800 commonly and in some of the pictures, you can’t find a trace of noise. What a difference since the A700 and A850 days where ISO 1600 was pushing unusable! I found a program that is astonishingly good at eliminating noise… Read more »
Tom, the settings were 1/1000 sec., f/4, 200mm, ISO 1250. f/4 is the wide open setting of the lens. I had the focus area on tracking-flexible spot and the focus type on continuous. The light was low because of clouds or I think it would have been lower ISO. These are jpegs straight out of the camera. My takeaway is that for very limited movement the tracking autofocus will provide some advantage over hand held refocusing. But I would say running animals or sport will be frustrating. Admittedly my technique for those things is non-existent but I think the results… Read more »