Patricia Wrede

Camera-eye is more distancing than tight third, because you don’t get to see individual characters’ thoughts and feelings, but in compensation, the scope is greater—the author can show anything that is happening in the area, whether the main character notices it or not, and can point out that the main character isn’t noticing it.

Camera-eye often gets used in multiple-viewpoint novels where the writer wants to give the reader a taste of what the villain is doing without actually going into the villain’s head as a tight third POV character (and thus giving away the villain’s whole plot).

The villain’s scenes get written in camera-eye, while all the hero’s scenes are in tight third.

Omniscient:

In omniscient viewpoint, the narrator is an invisible character who knows everything that has ever happened or will ever happen and everything that anyone is thinking or feeling, and who can report as much or as little of this as seems appropriate.

This year, the last-minute addition to the menu was a tray of cream cakes with fluffy green frosting that had taken the cook two hours to get just right.

Omniscient viewpoint doesn’t always give the reader a clear character to identify with. It is thus more distancing than intimate third-person or camera-eye third and, partly for these reasons, is uncommon in modern fiction.

Omniscient viewpoint is, generally speaking, the easiest viewpoint to do badly and the most difficult to do well for most authors.

Also, lots of folks who write omniscient tend to go for an omniscient that slants a bit toward either camera-eye or tight third-person.

In multiple viewpoint, each scene is limited to one viewpoint character, and that viewpoint character changes from scene to scene.

Narrator makes judgments about characters’ actions and reactions (“They were right.” and “If Jon had realized…he’d have been more careful.”) which has the effect of trying to force the reader’s reaction to what is going on instead of letting the reader decide for him or herself.

Omniscient also makes it much easier to “tell” what people are feeling (“she was disgusted”) instead of “showing” it (“Her lip curled in disgust”).