 A solid, full-featured camera with great performance and a good price All consumer-oriented AF 35mm SLRs provide a range of point-and-shoot modes plus a range of "serious" shooting modes, and nearly all provide full manual control of anything and everything when you want it. What differentiates the cameras is performance, ease of learning/ease of use, sturdiness, and price. Canon's EOS Elan models have done well in all these areas since the original Elan was introduced just about a decade ago. The newest Elan continues in this tradition, and then some. The third-generation EOS Elan 7 (the number comes from its seven AF points) is the quietest EOS camera to date—yet provides advance rates up to 4 fps (nearly twice the Elan II's 2.5-fps rate). It's the first camera to offer Eye Controlled Focus and built-in variable viewfinder-eyepiece correction. It's got those seven AF points (more than twice as many as the Elan II) and 35-zone Evaluative metering (nearly 6X the Elan II's six zones). It offers terrific performance. Yet it carries a price only slightly higher than its predecessor. The new EOS Elan 7 comes in three versions: the standard Elan 7, the Elan 7e with Eye Controlled Focus, and the Elan 7e Date with quartz date back. Our test camera was the Elan 7e.  | | The EOS Elan 7's excellent performance and wide range of features make it very easy to get pro-quality results in your photos. | Focusing
A new CMOS sensor array provides a wide AF area with those seven AF points—a central cross-type sensor, two vertical line sensors on each side, plus one horizontal line sensor above and one horizontal line sensor below the center sensor. You can select any of these yourself, just by looking at it (in the Elan 7e models with Eye Controlled Focusing), or by pressing the handy focusing-point keys in the center of the Quick Control Dial on the camera back. Or you can let the camera select the AF point. In One-Shot AF mode, the camera will focus on the closest subject to appear in the wide seven-point AF area, and let you know which AF point it's using by flashing it in the viewfinder. In AI Servo AF, the camera starts to track subject with the center AF point, and once the subject has been acquired, will automatically switch to other AF points with predictive AF to track it. Eye Controlled Focus makes autofocusing quicker and easier. Move the Eye Control Switch to the eye icon, and Eye Control is activated. To select one of the seven AF points, just look at it. In continuous AF mode (AI Servo AF), you can keep the focusing point on the moving subject just by looking at it in the finder. You must calibrate the camera for your eye before using Eye Control, but it's a very simple procedure. The camera will store up to five calibrations, so you can store settings for multiple users, or for one user with and without sunglasses, etc. Like the EOS Elan II, the Elan 7's Eye Control works for both horizontal- and vertical-format shooting, but it covers seven AF points instead of three, and is faster.
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