[Culture]

Or are you saying that it will find an eye anywhere covered by the sensors regardless of how you restrict the focus area?

This is what I have seen happen sometimes. To be fair, there was no person in the center focus. But rather on the edge of the frame. So It picked that eye, ignoring the center area entirely.
So I am thinking. Is it working as it should. In that sense that if the camera cannot find an eye in the focus area, will it focus on other "preferable" eye.

Culture.

---------- Post added 28-06-18 at 09:54 ----------

Also you can register a number of faces so that the camera looks for just those faces in the crowd. You can also prioritize. Finally, it is not a problem to override the eye autofocus and control it directly if you want. Just one more tool.

Of course this is also can cause a problem. Depending on the event.
If you program bride and groom. And at some point you want to focus on one of them, the camera will get confused.
But as a tool you have to know when to disable it. I guess you can assign it to one of the C buttons.

It sucks that I can test this camera the way I want it. All the fast lenses I want are not in stock.
I only have the pancake 16-50 and its too slow to test these focus modes the way I want.

[Sliver-Surfer]

What does it do if you have group shot, and you want focus, for hyperlocal reasons, on the person second closest to the camera? Is there an "all eyes in focus" setting. Any photographer can do single eye in focus. Calculating the hyperlocal setting for a gourd can be more difficult.

You could use it with one row just make sure you use the correct Aperture,DOF to account for staggered subjects ,. When I shoot groups with more than 2 rows I generally focus on the eyes of the middle row (Manually) or you can use flexible spot AF. In most Portrait situations you would not be concerned about Hyperfocal settings because you want to separate your subjects from the distant landscape.

---------- Post added 06-28-18 at 10:45 AM ----------

Of course this is also can cause a problem. Depending on the event.If you program bride and groom. And at some point you want to focus on one of them, the camera will get confused.But as a tool you have to know when to disable it. I guess you can assign it to one of the C buttons.

I am pretty sure you can assign that type of stuff to the user presets on mode dial for a quick change of a bunch of custom settings.

[thydian]

Upon some basic test it seems you can not limit the area per se. Rather it will focus on the eye of the person in the focus area.
So if I have center focus on my daughter's legs, the eye AF will be on her, with my son beside her.

I have heard that it grabs focus of the nearest eye.
So I have to do the test and with my son stand a little bit forward.

Culture.

This discussion prompted me to start trying out this feature on my new A73.

With center focus enabled I’ve observed that eye autofocus will find a single subjects eye anywhere in the frame regardless of center focus mode. With my wife and daughter in the frame it feels like the eyes closest to the focus area seems to win. I’ll have to see it closest to camera makes a difference.

Thanks for sharing your observations. I have a lot to learn.