tylerareber

Interesting! Yeah, I’ve been shooting for probably a decade now across a number of DSLRs and now with the Canon R5. It’s much more pronounced on the R5 than it ever was on any of my DSLRs (using the same lens EF 500 II IS USM). I have a buddy who shoots on Nikon and recently switched to the Z9 and he’s encountered the same behavior on that system. It becomes particularly problematic in the Spring when shooting Warblers. You have a small bird perched at some distance that puts the lens focus out pretty far. And then you try to quickly refocus to something close and the lens just kinda hangs up on that distant target. There’s some discussion around possibly something like Canons Quad Pixel AF fixing this, but who knows.

Mirrorless bodies combined with super-tele lenses seems to have a consistent issues across brands where trying to rack focus from a distant small target, like a bird, to something closer (maybe another bird) results in the lens more or less getting stuck and requiring a quick spin of the manual focus ring. This problem has some debate in the wildlife community in particular, but it feels like you can find enough people using each brand to conclude that it IS a problem that needs to be addressed. What are your thoughts on this? Is this an issue you’ve seen, and if so, what do you think the eventual fix will be?