i am thinking of moving up to an a2/5 from an elan iie. does the a2 have better autofocus than the ellan iie? how big is the spot meter? does it have a depth of field preview? should i get the a2 or 5? i hear the 5 is better. is the upgrade really worth it? all opinions are appreciated. thanks.

-- Jeff Nakayama (moonduck22@hotmail.com), December 02, 2001

Answers

"does the a2 have better autofocus than the ellan iie?" - No. The 5/A2e has five AF points but the Elan IIe focuses a bit quicker and the eye control is also faster on the Elan IIe.

"how big is the spot meter?" - 3.5% of the viewfinder. Which isn't exactly small, but the Elan IIe has a 9.5% partial area meter.

"does it have a depth of field preview?" - Yes, via custom function #11. Set it to "1" and the eye control can activate DOF Preview. Set it to "2" and the "*" button selects it. Obviously, option #1 is not available on the A2 cause it doesn't have eye control.

"should i get the a2 or 5? i hear the 5 is better." The A2 doesn't have eye control but the A2e and 5 do. The EOS 5 is better than the A2e because it has a manual meter scale in the viewfinder and the A2/A2e ony has +/- indicators. Also the 5 has an "auto pop-up" flash in some PIC modes and the A2/A2e forces manual selection of the pop- up flash.

"is the upgrade really worth it?" - No. It's not really an upgrade as you are giving away E-TTL flash metering and it's features (FEL, FP flash, and wireless mode). It's more a trade of features as the 5 has a better feel and a real spot meter. If flash isn't all that important then the 5 is probably a better camera than either of the Elans. The Elan 7e could be argued as a trade up and the 3 definitly is.

Keep in mind that the EOS 5/A2/A2e has a known defect in it's Command Dial. Good chance it will break on you sometime in it's life. Figure in the $100 cost for the permanent fix if you can't do it yourself.

-- Jim Strutz (j.strutz@gci.net), December 03, 2001.

I'll respectfully disagree with Jim about his conclusion that the "upgrade" is not worth it. It is, if you need specific features, like faster drive (5 vs. 2.8 fps) and a vertical grip that duplicates all the functions on the camera body. I have the two bodies (the Elan II was first), and those were specific features that I wanted, which the Elan lacked. If you get an EOS 5, the interface is very similar to the Elan II. The Eos 5/A2 also has a faster shutter, but I can't say that I've ever actually needed 1/8000 S.

-- Geoff Doane (geoff_doane@cbc.ca), December 04, 2001.