After summarising the conceptual relationship between some old and new techniques for fitting ellipses to data, we conduct a thorough experimental comparison of the discussed methods. The newer techniques promise consistency, unbiasedness, or hyper-accuracy, but our experiments reveal that in practice the performance of these estimators is difficult to distinguish from the performance of established estimators. Since the newer techniques could potentially be extended to other estimation problems, we discuss what implications our experimental findings have for solving more general multiple-view geometry estimation problems.