AF assist on 20D vs. D60

I feel like this is a stupid question, but I couldn't find anything in the manual that explained it. Maybe I'm just missing something. On my D60, in low light situations, I'd get a beam of light (not from the flash) that assisted the auto-focus. I just got my 20D yesterday... and, unless I had the flash popped-up, I got no beam of light. The AF assist with the flash was short bursts of light that emitted from the flash. On the D60, it was more of a steady light.

I checked the settings to make sure I had AF assist enabled (it it does).

Does anyone know if this is a known difference between the 2 bodies?

It is indeed a difference. They did away with the focus assist lamp on the 10D, switching to a short burst from the flash. They have now continued this arrangement with the 20D.

I guess what I don't like about that is that I have to physically flip up the flash head to get the AF assist.... and then, at least when I'm in 'P'rogram mode, it assumes that you also want to use the flash for the exposure.... and the flash fires.

I assume that there's an easy to way to remedy that.....?

If you don't mind the annoying pulsing flashes from the internal flash for focus assist, there is a custom setting you can set to prevent the flash from firing. This is set with C.Fn-07. And you can control whether the focus assist light will fire or not with C.Fn-05.

Or, if you have one of the external EX series flashes, you can just mount that and it'll fire an IR focus assist light which is not as annoying as the flash pulses from the internal flash. You'll still need to set the C.Fn-07 so that the flash doesn't fire if you only want to use it for AF assist.

Custom Function #07 disables the flash firing during shooting but still allows it to be used as a focus assist lamp.

Of course, having to go in and change this setting frequently would get rather tedious.

That seems like a bit of a step backwards, doesn't it? That's an awful lot of messing around just to get focus in low light! Oh well. I'll adapt....