FoCal Automatic AF alignment

[Dimitris]

So was reading about this on FM (man I spend a lot of time there) and figures for £25 why not, I was always curious if my lens needed any adjustments. Got it late last night and ran a couple of primes through it, mainly the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 and Nikon 35 f/2. For Nikon (D700 in my case), it takes a little more work as the software can't make changes to the micro-adjust function so it took about 15 per lens. The Sigma needed +5 and the Nikon needed -3 and anecdotally both seem to be sharper wide open because of the adjustment.

For zoom lens, with the way micro adjust works currently on Nikon and Canon (the 1Dx or whatever will allow two points according to the manual), you can only choose one end of the spectrum to calibrate and the software recommends doing the tele end as DOF is shallower the further out you go. Tonight or tomorrow I'm going to see what it does to my Nikon 24-120 f/4 at 120mm and my 105 f/2.8.

I guess the question is, is it worth the £25? Not sure but I guess it's another neat toy to play with It was surprisingly easy too, you print out a target, adjust some stuff on the camera as per the manual and then plug the camera into the computer to do it's thing. I've not used lens align or the other stuff so can't compare accuracy but it's looking good so far.

Here's the site of the guy who makes the software http://www.reikan.co.uk/focal/focal.html

[rhommel]

bump on this... were you able to do the afma for your zoom lenses? how long did it take?

and which version did you get? standard, plus or pro?

[Dimitris]

I got plus as I didn't need the other features of the pro and I'm cheap. I af'ed the following 4 lenses:

Nikon AF 35mm f/2.0D	                  -2
Sigma HSM 50 f/1.4                        +2
Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8 VR IF-ED	  +3
Nikon AF-S 24-120 f/4 VR IF-ED	  +9

For the first two lenses I used the 50x focal length rule, for the last two they were both done at around 15 feet which is the furthest away I could get from my desktop in my basement which is somewhat less than the 50x feet range. As my D700 only supports one tune setting I picked the telephoto end. You can see my 24-120 needed the most correcting which surprised me. I did two runs of each lens and then combined the numbers and it was very consistent between runs (if I recall the 24-120 was 9 and 10 so I went with 9 just because).

All in all it was really easy and the results are surprising. With my primes, for the most part I only noticed a slight increase in sharpness which was only really apparent wide open, with the 24-120 it made the lens really shine. I was happy with it (it's an f/4 lenses so already pretty decent DoF) but now it's really sharp. For the 105VR, as it's a macro lens, I chose to FT it at infinite rather than macro ranges because I use it as portrait lens more than a macro lens.

Should be easier to do on Canon as the software can do it all for you while on Nikon you have to adjust the fine tune manually between each series of shots. Still didn't take long at all.

Haven't tried my 70-300VR yet but that lens has to go back to Nikon to fix the busted VR.

[rhommel]

I got plus as I didn't need the other features of the pro and I'm cheap. I af'ed the following 4 lenses:

Nikon AF 35mm f/2.0D                      -2
Sigma HSM 50 f/1.4                        +2
Nikon AF-S 105mm f/2.8 VR IF-ED      +3
Nikon AF-S 24-120 f/4 VR IF-ED      +9

For the first two lenses I used the 50x focal length rule, for the last two they were both done at around 15 feet which is the furthest away I could get from my desktop in my basement which is somewhat less than the 50x feet range. As my D700 only supports one tune setting I picked the telephoto end. You can see my 24-120 needed the most correcting which surprised me. I did two runs of each lens and then combined the numbers and it was very consistent between runs (if I recall the 24-120 was 9 and 10 so I went with 9 just because).

All in all it was really easy and the results are surprising. With my primes, for the most part I only noticed a slight increase in sharpness which was only really apparent wide open, with the 24-120 it made the lens really shine. I was happy with it (it's an f/4 lenses so already pretty decent DoF) but now it's really sharp. For the 105VR, as it's a macro lens, I chose to FT it at infinite rather than macro ranges because I use it as portrait lens more than a macro lens.

Should be easier to do on Canon as the software can do it all for you while on Nikon you have to adjust the fine tune manually between each series of shots. Still didn't take long at all.

Haven't tried my 70-300VR yet but that lens has to go back to Nikon to fix the busted VR.

that's awesome Dmitris! I think I am sold on this one, would probably go with the Plus as well.
I think this would be beneficial for me, as I rent a few glasses every wedding the I shoot. I started noticing that some of the lenses I rent are not as sharp (on certain range) as i would like.

and I will be in the same boat as you. 5D MK III is not fully automatic (as of yet)... it would require manual setting change (MSC) mode, just like the nikons

thanks again for the update!

[MojoMojo]

That's the biggest concern I have with manual/micro adjustments, they can't do every focal length at every distance for a zoom lens
Gotta hard calibrate it by bringing it to Nikon.