fly-by-wire manual focus: good or bad?

what is your experience?

Olympus has had this on their lenses since the original 4/3 and my experience with that system is that it's just not the same. It's usable, but it's got some lag and fine tuning is difficult because it's hard to judge how much a little flick of the focus ring is going to adjust focus.

The EF 85mm f/1.2L I & II uses this approach and it works quite well but I do like the feel of the mechanical approach on 50mm f/1.2L better.

I think it sucks on the 85L II. Too loose to be precise at 1.2.

Sounds about as easy to use as the manual focus on my PowerShot A720IS. It has it, but I haven't really found a reasonable use for it. You have to be really stopped down to use it with any degree of accuracy.

It's a nice little P&S though... 8mp with manual exposure mode, Tv, Av, optical viewfinder, and the aforementioned manual focus. Still serves me well when I don't want to drag my 60D along.

Hated it on my EP-1/17mm 2.8 combo. Will do my best never to buy another fly-by-wire MF lens again.

Imagine that you can tune, how should you turn ring to make focus go from infinity to MDF.
I menad you can tune that 90 degree turn make the focus run big distance, that will perform like a kit lens, made a little turn and focus goes to nowhere.
And you can tune a focus for a 2x360 turn. So you can turn ring 30 degrees and focus goes only in 5 cm. That can be useful for a manual focusing.
And all the possible values in between this two.

Focus ring then became a tuneable know which actualy controls how the focusing goes. It'd be nice if you can use it for something different. Like exposure control, or aperture control.