This is my description of what the functions do based on my experience, so I definitely recommend checking out the manual if you have any detailed questions; this guide is just some help with what they do and suggestions for use. There's no warranty here, this is just based on the cameras that I own; use at your own risk.
Remember that these only work in creative mode, and not in any of the program modes. This is actually handy, because if you're tossing your camera to your wife or grandma to take a picture of you in front of the Eiffel tower replica in Vegas or something, you don't have to try to explain CF4 to them...:-)
I don't have the 7e, and I don't know what (if anything) is different about it
Elan 7 custom functions
| CF | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | High speed film rewind; I almost always have this one on. It makes it louder, but still pretty quiet. |
| 2 | Leader out rewind. Useful for changing film types. Before I had two bodies, I always had this one on, just make sure to be methodical about handling the film so you don't expose a roll twice. |
| 3 | Cancels DX film-speed setting. You can always override it, so I'm not sure why you'd want to turn this one on... |
| 4 | My favorite! Autofocus moves to the "AE-lock" button on the back. No more accidental autofocus when shooting a picture. The Elan 7 has two possible settings here. Setting it to 1 makes it behave the like EOS5. 0 is normal, and setting it to 2 is like CF6 on the EOS5 (makes the AE-lock buttom stop AF). |
| 5 | Plain old mirror lockup. |
| 6 | Makes the flash fire at the end of the exposure instead of the beginning. Useful for long exposures at night. I'm sure you can find a tutorial somewhere on the internet about why this would be useful, but basically it makes the streaks of headlights, or whatever appear behind the lit-up thing instead of in front of it. |
| 7 | Lots of settings here, cycles through main flash firing and AF-assist light turning on. 0 is both, 1 is no AF assist but flash, 2 is turns off the internal af-assist but leaves the one on the external flash enabled, and 3 does af-assist but no flash. This mostly leaves me shrugging my shoulders. |
| 8 | Links partial metering to the chosen AF point. The partial meter circle is so big, I'm not sure this is super-valuable. |
| 9 | A very important one; makes the flash the primary light. The shutter speed gets set to 1/125 in aperature priorty mode, which forces the flash to pump out enough light to light the scene on it's own. This one is on a lot for me (in conjuction with my external flash). |
| 10 | Stops the autofocus boxes from turning red when focused. Not sure why you'd want to disable this, so I've never used it. I find it handy to know where the camera is focused, but this one is strictly personal prefrence I suppose |
| 11 | How do you want to choose your focusing point? 0 makes it hitting the focus-selector button, then the arrow keys. 1 is just the arrow keys, and then hitting the focus-selector button returns it to auto-select (this is my preference). Finally 2 makes it the focus-selector button, then the two command dials to go back and forth. |
| 12 | Forces the focus-selector button to jump to the center focusing point. Not bad, but I haven't experimented enough to see how it interacts with 11. |
| 13 | Controls the lens AF stop button. I don't have any lenses with this button, but it selects what you'd want to do with it if you did have it: 0 is AF stop, 1 is AF start, 2 is AE lock, 3 toggles manual and automatic focus point selection, 4 switches from one should and servo AF modes, and 5 fires up the image stabilizer. |