Focustune

I have to share recent experience.

Been shooting indoor basketball for a while. I do alot of special rec and Special Olympics. Highschool. College.

Results have been ok. Keeper rate not as high as I might like, but ok. Working on technique. Tweaked the equipment a bit. Practice. My lenses of choice are a 30mm siggy, a 50mm siggy, and an 85mm canon. It's challenging environment.

When I moved up to a 7d, I did the microadjust thing - printed the target, and the tape, and tinkered with it a bit. Several times. Results were - well, indeterminate.

Last week, on a podcast, I heard someone mention focustune, as their "pick of the week". It's software to help you optimize (among other things) the MA of you lenses. I'm aware of other products, but frankly I'm cheap. this was 30 bucks, so I downloaded it over the weekend, and spent a couple hours tuning the 3 lenses I mentioned above. All 3 needed a tweak, according to the analysis, from -12 to +5.

Shot a BBall game Tuesday night.

OMG.

What a difference. Focus is a little touching with an indoor, fast-moving game, with crappy lighting anyway. I had attributed my issues to that. What a difference. I mostly shot with the 50 - i was having a good time. sharper, Clearer. Best 30 bucks I ever spent. Easily.

It is not my intention to be a shill for focustune, but rather, a shill for microadjusting your lenses. For me, it took focustune to get it right. For you - manually, via this or another product, or a professional service. You've got this neat feature on your camera (maybe). Find a way to use it and get the most out of your gear.

That being said - I liked this product. I haven't used others.

http://michaeltapesdes​ign.com/focustune.html

Jim

One thing about Canon's MFA and these focus tests in general. In order to properly calibrate an instrument, you need to adjust both the zero point and the gain of the amplifier. Think of the spoke of a line. You need a zero point and you need the slope. Canon has a voltage and a frequency pot in their EF lenses for this. Since this is proprietary information from Canon as to which controls which, I would guess the voltage is the zero point and the frequency is the gain.

Either way that is two different parameters related to AF accuracy. There is simply no way you can control one parameter, MFA, in software to control two different physical parameters. So what does this mean? Well there is no way software like this can fix every problem because Canon's MFA feature is in itself flawed. Software can optimize the results, but it can't fix every situation.

Specifically for me, my 70-200/4 IS and my 60/2.8 are out of calibration in a way that MFA could fix and with MFA, they are excellent. However the first copy of both my 24-105 and my 85/1.8 could not be fixed by MFA.