A flash of perfect focus then it can't focus

[mathbias]

My Canon SX530 has a behavior that is super frustrating. It reliably happens under two conditions and sometimes under other conditions:

Trying to auto focus, it will flash a perfectly focused image of what I'm trying to focus on the screen for a moment, then go to blurred and fail to focus.

It will do that whenever the subject is too close for it to focus. At higher telephoto levels it will do that whenever there is only moderately bright lighting (it auto focuses well in telephoto only outdoors in bright direct sunlight).

But if it can't focus, how can it flash a perfect focused image on the screen for a moment? That is barely understandable for high telephoto moderate light. It is incomprehensible for closer than the camera can focus. If it can't focus that close how does it do that for a moment?

Manual focus on that camera (at least for me) is useless. It certainly won't let me focus on any of the things where the above problem occurs. Too close for auto focus is too close by even more for manual focus.

Frustrations like that caused me to buy a much more expensive camera: Sony a7 iii with FE 3.5-5.6/28-70 OSS lens.

But the Sony does that as well: Try to auto focus too close, even under half the distance it is willing to focus at, and it usually flashes a perfectly focused image on the screen for a moment before refusing to focus. It doesn't have nearly as much telephoto as the Canon and generally has far less trouble with low light than my Canon, so there isn't a second situation in which that often happens. But it does sometimes flash a perfect focus image (on the screen for a moment) of a distant object that I'm trying to focus in fairly low light with widest aperture, then nothing I can do makes it actually focus that well.

What is going on? Where does a momentary flash of great focus come from? Why can't it focus that well for more than a moment?
Am I doing something wrong?

I doubt I could get a picture during that instant, even if my own reflexes were 100 times faster. So there is nothing I can think of to post to show any of this.

 

[RAZKY]

My Canon SX530 has a behavior that is super frustrating. It reliably happens under two conditions and sometimes under other conditions:

Trying to auto focus, it will flash a perfectly focused image of what I'm trying to focus on the screen for a moment, then go to blurred and fail to focus.

It will do that whenever the subject is too close for it to focus. At higher telephoto levels it will do that whenever there is only moderately bright lighting (it auto focuses well in telephoto only outdoors in bright direct sunlight).

But if it can't focus, how can it flash a perfect focused image on the screen for a moment? That is barely understandable for high telephoto moderate light. It is incomprehensible for closer than the camera can focus. If it can't focus that close how does it do that for a moment?

Manual focus on that camera (at least for me) is useless. It certainly won't let me focus on any of the things where the above problem occurs. Too close for auto focus is too close by even more for manual focus.

Frustrations like that caused me to buy a much more expensive camera: Sony a7 iii with FE 3.5-5.6/28-70 OSS lens.

But the Sony does that as well: Try to auto focus too close, even under half the distance it is willing to focus at, and it usually flashes a perfectly focused image on the screen for a moment before refusing to focus. It doesn't have nearly as much telephoto as the Canon and generally has far less trouble with low light than my Canon, so there isn't a second situation in which that often happens. But it does sometimes flash a perfect focus image (on the screen for a moment) of a distant object that I'm trying to focus in fairly low light with widest aperture, then nothing I can do makes it actually focus that well.

What is going on? Where does a momentary flash of great focus come from? Why can't it focus that well for more than a moment?
Am I doing something wrong?

I doubt I could get a picture during that instant, even if my own reflexes were 100 times faster. So there is nothing I can think of to post to show any of this.

What did Canon support say when you asked them?

 

[mathbias]

I never tried customer support for a camera.
For most products, I never found customer support able to answer any issues an intelligent customer might have. They generally work from a decision-tree-script that assumes an incredibly stupid customer (because most are).
If I thought the problem was a unit defect, rather than a design defect, I would have tried customer support and when that failed, returned the product. If the problem is user error, I'm still sure it is beyond the level at which customer support could help. If it is a design defect, it seems unlikely that a different camera would solve that without costing a lot more and/or being flawed in some worse way.