Six ingenious ways how Canon DSLRs used to illuminate their autofocus points

ExAr a day ago | parent | next [-]

This article presents the inventive solutions Canon has found to shoot beams of light into the camera's viewfinder in order to light up individual autofocus points. Six different approaches are shown using six Canon DSLR models between 1994 and 2009.

	▲	myself248 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's absolutely wild to me that this function would be so important as to justify all the time and effort to create not just two, but six entirely different ways of solving it. The first one seemed perfectly adequate to me. But I guess that's why I'm not a Canon engineer.

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Sharlin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

@ExAr I suspect your comment was downvoted to oblivion because people didn't realize you're the OP and thought you were an LLM summarizer bot :(

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jagged-chisel 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The comment reads like an LLM summary. And we don’t typically get an OP summary on a new post. Just post it and let people read it.

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xnorswap 4 hours ago | parent [-]

HN appears to encourage it, because it shows a text box which becomes a top level comment when you submit, although it isn't obvious that will happen.

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Sharlin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Huh, that definitely explains it. I wonder how many people know that. In that case it's particularly unfortunate to downvote the OP simply for filling a field in the submission form! Sigh… I guess it's another case of LLMs having made the world a little worse for everybody.

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jagged-chisel 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t think it’s because the comment was submitted. I think it’s because it reads like LLM output.

Personally, I’ve only ever provided a summary if I felt the headline wasn’t clear enough.

	▲	Sharlin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, but before LLMs we didn't have "reads like LLM output" as a downvote reason. In 2022 nobody would've had qualms with the phrasing of the comment.

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jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's perfectly ok, they're using HN almost exclusively for promotion. See comment/submission history.

	▲	Sharlin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But the articles are well-researched, very high quality (the illustrations in particular are incredible), and in every way prime HN material, and there's no money involved as far as I can see. I definitely don't have any qualms about self-promotion of this sort of stuff.

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TheSilva 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

hijacking the thread to ask: under 200€ DSLR to get started?

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rrreese 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You can get a Canon 5D II or a Canon 6D for that. Older cameras for sure, but full frame with excellent sensors. And there are a ton of inexpensive used EF lenses available.

Compared to moderns systems the main difference is the autofocus and video capabilities. Modern mirrorless have cosmically better tracking, eye detect etc.

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myself248 2 hours ago | parent [-]

To add: Hit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS_5D_Mark_II and scroll down to the very end, then click "show" to expand the "Canon EOS digital SLR timeline". This is an incredible collection of information that I can't figure out how to link directly.

	▲	rrreese 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The direct link is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam... You can get to it by pressing the `V` in `V T E` at the top left of any tmeplate
	▲	jmusall 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Direct link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Canon_EOS_digital_cam... Not sure why it is a "template".