I'm one of the beta testers and it is a great product. It's light years ahead of the original versions. I had previously adjusted all of my lens with the lensalign. The FoCal was spot on or showed improvement over what I had them set on. It also did seven lens's in less than an hour. That was with me manually running through the process after the fully auto mode finished to confirm the results.
The new target set up is genius. Fire up the software, point it at the target and it will walk you through what to do. A few automatic shutter actuations later and it has you review the results. Rich has done an outstanding job in developing this.
Couldn't find much of anything on planned pricing for FoCal on his website. There was one note about the beta give-away being worth £3500, so with 50 beta testers, I guess that translates into £70 for the Pro version?
erikburd wrote:
Knowing Canon, they will figure out a way to to milk a ton of money out of our pockets and probably ruin a perfectly good program that would otherwise benefit many people.
If they did that, the creator of this software would be in for a HUGE payday... you cant just copy somebody's product
troy12n wrote:
... you cant just copy somebody's product
Of course you can. Especially if the originator can't afford to take you to court, or at least, out-last you in court, and courts of appeal, and etc. Of course, if the originator didn't specifiy copyright protection or file a patent (whichever is most relevant), then they can't even take you to court. Well, at least, they can't win there.
I use lens align, but have pre-ordered it and will see if I get different or better results, which I doubt, but it could happen. Getting your camera and lens alighed properly to the target is very critical, so I'm interested in how they accompllish this.
scalesusa wrote:
I use lens align, but have pre-ordered it and will see if I get different or better results, which I doubt, but it could happen. Getting your camera and lens alighed properly to the target is very critical, so I'm interested in how they accompllish this.
ok, sounds promising.... Can someone say they have used it to MA a 300mm 2.8?
If so, it would be helpful to understand the details that were envolved to achieve it.
Thanks for posting this. I have use MA before with my own targets, and was about to purchase a LensAlign just to make sure I got it right, but being a software developer myself, I always felt a product like this should be possible. I just placed an order and will give it a try to see how close I was...
Is this MA product, or others, suitable for models other than 5D2 or 7D? Such as models without MA function, like 60D? Or older models such as 1D2, 1Ds2?
Let's say you have four bodies and 12 EF/EF-S lenses -- about how long does it take to go through all combinations?
Still no MA remedy for Alt or aftermarket MF lenses like Zeiss/Voigtlander or Samyang, Leica?
Personally, my desire is that the makers come up with a better focusing method that is accurate for any lens mounted on any body.
One question. Since the target is flat (unlike the Lens Align which has a sloped scale, or staggered batteries, etc.) won't there be a fairly wide range of MA adjustments that the lens appears in focus? Particularly lenses with smaller (f/4 and above) apertures with greater DOF?
With a sloped target, you can visually see if the depth of field is centered around the target. With a flat target, you can't.
......terrible quality....can't really make out the procedure............