Sony A7 III Sony A7 III eye detect is awful, anybody else finding this?

MrWriter

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At Xmas I bought a Sony A7 III with a Sony FE 85mm f1.8 Prime Lens and a Sony FE 50mm f1.8 Lens and I find the eye detect system to be terrible to the point I'm thinking of sending all this kit back for a refund.

Even with a close head-and-shoulders shot of an English girl with pale completion and big wide eyes the Sony just can't lock a little green square onto her eyes, it only ever finds a face with a large green square around the face, but rarely the eyes. I have to keep lowing my camera, giving it a shake (for what good that does) and bringing camera back up to my eye, or asking the model to turn her face square on to camera, only then does a little green square appear over an eye, but it's only ever there for a second, then it vanishes and goes back to the large green square over entire face.

If I do a tight face crop, cutting through forehead and chin, then it finds an eye, but anything less than that and it's garbage. I only bought this Sony as good old Jarad Polin on YouTube said Sony's focusing eye detect system was number one, I'm finding it to be the worse I've tried. I had a Nikon Z7, but got rid of it due to it cutting out all the time with battery grip attached, but the Z7 eye detect was a zillion times better than this Sony I now have.

I know there is nothing wrong with the camera, it's not a fault, but before I send all this stuff back for a refund and look at a Canon R6 instead, could it be possible it's a setting somewhere? I'm pretty savvy with settings and even though some folk say Sony's menu is a pain in the but, I find it just as easy to use as my old Canon EOS 5D MK4, which had a nice easy menu.

So, are there any menu settings for 'eye detect sensitivity' that I might have missed?
 
Thanks WeeMalky, that's a good video and half of those settings I did not have set correctly. I've changed camera settings and will try that out in the coming days and, hopefully, it will be ok, will let you know.
 
I would like to hear your experience. After seeing so many videos about how great the eye AF was on this camera, I felt a little disappointed about this feature. I thought it was just me. Will try the video suggested by @WeeMalky .
 
Osval, try the settings on the YouTube video too and let me know how you get on. I did not have my focus zone set to 'wide' I had it on 'centre' so I suspect the persons eyes were outside my zone hence was not picking them out, I suspect, though have not tried it since changing to 'wide' that this will fix everything. I'll be trying it out tomorrow and I'm going to flick between wide and centre to see if that was the issue.
 
Update, setting focus area to 'wide' instead of 'centre zone' fixed the situation. Turned out the camera could not see the eyes as they were not in the 'centre zone' of the frame as I follow rule-of-thirds and eyes are normally on top third somewhere, just outsize the 'centre' focus zone. Since putting to 'wide' it finds eyes every time now. I also find 'continuous' focus is better too. Thanks Wee, much appreciated.
 
That's good news Mr W glad it helped

Malcolm 🙏
 
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