New Sony A7III/A7RIII Firmware 3.0 Real-Time Animal Eye AF

In the previous post, I tested the real-time eye AF on humans. As there was a pet show over the weekend, I decided to head over and test out the other feature of the new firmware 3.0 for the Sony A7III and A7RIII.

For this test, I decided to use the slowest of my Sony-branded lenses - the FE 90mm f2.8 Macro G OSS lens. I use this lens predominantly for what it was primarily intended - macro photography. Sometimes, though, I would take it out for portraitures as I find the bokeh at f2.8 way more pleasing than my 24-70GM.  However, during many these shoots, I found that the speed of the auto-focus mechanism just a wee bit short of my liking.

So upon testing the lens on the new firmware 3.0, I was very pleasantly surprised that the lens now focuses much faster. Not only that, the real-time eye AF on my human subjects are just spectacular. So now my FE 90 macro has a new lease on life - being that of a portrait lens. And for that, the sharpness is beyond comparison, coming up just second to the FE 85 f1.4 GM according to the folks at dxomarks.

So how did the new firmware 3.0 live up to its claim of a real-time animal eye AF? Well, just one word - incredible! The results speak for itself! For dogs at least, no matter what breed, colour or size, every shot was spot-on right to the eyes of the subject matter. All of the pictures were shot fully wide at f2.8.

Even when the dogs were not looking straight-on, the real-time animal eye AF system worked flawlessly, producing shot after shot of perfectly-focused pictures.  

Feline lovers too rejoice! The animal AF system works on cats as well.

There weren't too many choices of animals to shoot in the pet exhibition, so I will test on other animals in the weeks ahead. One thing the show had were colourful parrots and unfortunately the animal AF is a hit-and miss and it is not always a lock-on to the eyes of these birds.

The animal eye AF focus can be tricked. In this straight-on shot, the AF mistook the nostrils as the eyes and locked onto them instead.