Is Live View AF more acurate than AF thru View Finder?

Anyone else experiencing that their AF thru live view gets more accurate results?? And is this normal? I kno its contrast based and its slower to lock on so maybe this is why?

No - if I manually focus yes, but not with AF.

It can be, because it uses contrast focusing and in a good contrasty situation, the sensor is AFing the lens and you get what the sensor sees, and that can be very accurate in certain cases. AF through the viewfinder doesn't use the sensor at all, and if there is any variance at all that the light travels from mirror to AF sensors vs light to sensor, you will get error. This is what microadjustment is supposed to help address.

Yes. Assuming your camera is not set to use the 'Quick' AF mode in Live View.

The 'Quick' mode uses the same AF system as normal shooting. This relies on something called 'phase difference'. The camera looks at the light Coming from the scene, figures out how far the lens needs to move to get the subject in focus, tells the lens to move that far - and that's it. There's no check to see if it actually is in focus. Because it's impossible to manufacture the two bits of this system with infinite accuracy there will be some small errors. MFA can help the system to cancel those errors in some cases.

When you use the 'Live Mode' Live View focusing it uses the actual image on the sensor and looks at the contrast in the area of the AF zone. It moves the lens until that contrast is at maximum. This will be at least as accurate as the 'Quick' mode, and often more accurate. But it is damn slow.

hollis_f wrote in post #10941713
When you use the 'Live Mode' Live View focusing it uses the actual image on the sensor and looks at the contrast in the area of the AF zone. It moves the lens until that contrast is at maximum. This will be at least as accurate as the 'Quick' mode, and often more accurate. But it is damn slow.

Agreed.

If you want the most accurate focus possible, Live View's Live Mode with X10 magnification and manual focus is the ultimate. But forget doing this without a tripod! You'll get a solid understanding of how much shake you get from the smallest touch.

-js