Originally posted by Digitalis I agree, The Canon TS-E and Nikkor PC-E lenses are all manual focus only. I'd suspect even the slightest amount of Tilt would play merry hell with contrast and phase AF.
Actually, pure tilt isn't so bad -- the rays from the center of the lens to the center of the sensor are still nice and perpendicular to the sensor. It's really no different than attempting to AF a brick wall at an angle.
On the other hand, any shift of the exit pupil beyond a few mm (the exact number depends on the lens aperture and PDAF aperture) is wholly incompatible with both DSLR and on-sensor PDAF because it blacks-out one half of the phase contrast system.
CDAF should work all right with both tilt and shift although it might be a bit slower or hunt a bit more because any advanced analysis of the blur to predict the required AF motion would be confounded by the strange behavior of blur circles in a T/S lens relative to a normal lens.
There's also the issue that when these T/S lenses were originally designed there was no cost effective way to have a mechanical drive train that could connect the camera body AF motor to the tilted/shifted focus assembly.