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

(exclusivearchitecture.com)

63 points | by ExAr 1 day ago

3 comments

  • ExAr 1 day ago
    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 1 hour ago
      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.

  • Sharlin 3 hours ago
    @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 :(
    • jagged-chisel 3 hours ago
      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.
      • xnorswap 3 hours ago
        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.
        • Sharlin 2 hours ago
          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.
          • jagged-chisel 2 hours ago
            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 1 hour ago
              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.
    • jacquesm 3 hours ago
      That's perfectly ok, they're using HN almost exclusively for promotion. See comment/submission history.
      • Sharlin 2 hours ago
        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.
  • TheSilva 1 hour ago
    hijacking the thread to ask: under 200€ DSLR to get started?