Sony A7R IV vs Nikon Z7 vs Canon EOS R5 – Is Sony still the king of Eye autofocus?

Much has been said over the years about Sony’s Eye Autofocus system and it was one of Sony’s biggest selling points for portrait photographers for a long time. Even after Canon and Nikon finally jumped into the world of mirrorless cameras, Sony still seemed to be on top when it came to their autofocus system.

But now that Nikon and Canon have had their systems out for a while and they’ve been working on them, does the same hold true today? In this video, Jared Polin (AKA FroKnowsPhoto) puts the Canon EOS R5, Sony A7R IV and Nikon Z7 mirrorless cameras to the test to see how they stand up in a head-to-head comparison.

While the EOS R5 is somewhat newer than both the A7R IV and Z7, the latter have both received a number of firmware updates since their release to improve their autofocus capabilities. All three cameras were set to their default AF modes and mounted side-by-side using 85mm lenses (for all tests except one) set to f/1.8 (to match the slowest lens in the lineup).

The video is 21-minutes long, so it’ll take a while to get through. Most of it is dedicated to actual testing and analysis of the results, though. If you want the whole story, watch the video, but in short, the Nikon shows significant improvement from where it was at launch, although it still seems to lag behind Sony. The EOS R5 on the other hand actually looks like it might have the edge over both of them.

None of them appears to be particularly terrible, though.