This article presents the inventive solutions Canon has found to shoot beams of light into the camera's viewfinder in order to light up individual autofocus points. Six different approaches are shown using six Canon DSLR models between 1994 and 2009.
It's absolutely wild to me that this function would be so important as to justify all the time and effort to create not just two, but six entirely different ways of solving it.
The first one seemed perfectly adequate to me. But I guess that's why I'm not a Canon engineer.
I haven't used all of them, but I have used both the 9 point and the 45 point types, and the difference is massive. The 45 point was far, far more tactile and responsive. I don't mean speed of autofocus, but the actual way that the points sit over top of the viewfinder and light up, it's hard to explain. I'm sure part of that is software, but owning an older model and then trying out a newer one in the camera store in like 2013 really was eye opening, it blew my mind. The 9 point feels like a toy.
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