BenV wrote:
not sure if trolling, or just stupid...
Why?
It puzzles me why a big company like Sigma (or Nikon) is not able to develop and make lenses that deliver sharp pictures straight from the box. Obviously their AF-design sucks or they don't want to spend more time and money to get it right. Instead the customer has to do it, but now with a fancy box.
I really can't understand why you (and many others) just accept this.
It puzzles me why a big company like Sigma (or Nikon) is not able to develop and make lenses that deliver sharp pictures straight from the box. Obviously their AF-design sucks or they don't want to spend more time and money to get it right. Instead the customer has to do it, but now with a fancy box.
I really can't understand why you (and many others) just accept this.
Because even with a less high-tech mechanism like changing your car's tires you need to perform wheel balancing for the new tires. When you install new guitar strings you fine tune them. When you install a new home theater you fine tune it... Need more examples?
That aside, I only see you targeting Sigma about this issue, but I never seen such enthusiasm against other brands.
It puzzles me why a big company like Sigma (or Nikon) is not able to develop and make lenses that deliver sharp pictures straight from the box. Obviously their AF-design sucks or they don't want to spend more time and money to get it right. Instead the customer has to do it, but now with a fancy box.
I really can't understand why you (and many others) just accept this.
At a minimum they need to be profiled at the factory with the values written into the firmware so that the lenses and bodies play nicely together. Ideally, the manufacturing tolerances and what is acceptable needs to be improved.
wiseguy010 wrote:
It puzzles me why a big company like Sigma (or Nikon) is not able to develop and make lenses that deliver sharp pictures straight from the box. Obviously their AF-design sucks or they don't want to spend more time and money to get it right. Instead the customer has to do it, but now with a fancy box.
I really can't understand why you (and many others) just accept this.
It's not just time and money - there really are manufacturing tolerances. The first thing we do when we mount a $20,000 Zeiss Cinema zoom to a $50,000 RED camera is check and adjust the focusing and shimming. No two mount up exactly the same way new out of the box if you're critical enough in your examination - and pro cinematographers are really critical.
Not to mention after a few months, they've changed a bit and the shimming for the same camera and lens will be a bit different than it was before.
hijazist wrote:
Because even with a less high-tech mechanism like changing your car's tires you need to perform wheel balancing for the new tires. When you install new guitar strings you fine tune them. When you install a new home theater you fine tune it... Need more examples?
Manufacturers are not in control of every variable in those scenarios, but camera and lens manufacturers are. Tolerances for their equipment are driven by cost, so increasing tolerances would therefore increase price. However, instead of offering cameras and lenses that would be more expensive, this solution offsets the manufacturing cost by using free labor provided by the customer. There are pros and cons to the lens dock, and I don't think we should ignore either.
> It's not just time and money - there really are manufacturing tolerances. The first thing we do when we mount a $20,000 Zeiss Cinema zoom to a $50,000 RED camera is check and adjust the focusing and shimming. No two mount up exactly the same way new out of the box if you're critical enough in your examination - and pro cinematographers are really critical.
Frank_Maiello wrote:
Manufacturers are not in control of every variable in those scenarios, but camera and lens manufacturers are. Tolerances for their equipment are driven by cost, so increasing tolerances would therefore increase price. However, instead of offering cameras and lenses that would be more expensive, this solution offsets the manufacturing cost by using free labor provided by the customer. There are pros and cons to the lens dock, and I don't think we should ignore either.
Sigma has hit on a solution that fits perfectly with there products and customer base as I see it. Many lenses, "not just Sigma", come from the factory needing front/back focus adjustments but only top of the line cameras offer MFA with the camera. There's a lot of folks that buy the more economical T5i, 60D, D5200 and others that don't offer the MFA feature. they also buy third party lenses because they are more in their price range and almost as good as canon/nikon lenses. Sigma has given these buyers the option to MFA their lenses to perfection and Sigma makes a little by producing and selling the Dock & software for their new lenses.
I don't think Sigma had saving labor by letting the customer do their adjustment work for them in mind as a cost saving strategy though. They increased the quality of an already good lens to very good by this new technology. I may be wrong but aren't some of the OOF problems camera specific and not necessarily caused by the lens it self?
The reason why phase detection AF is so much faster than contrast detection is both its' blessing and its' doom.
PDAF works by prediction. A correctly set up and calibrated PDAF system NEVER has to second guess a result. It knows where it is and also where it's supposed to be - and then is KNOWS how much to turn the focusing to get there. No need to double-check, no need to hestitate - just get there as fast as possible.
Contrast AF needs several hundred images (LV fps is often 60fps+, nowadays in the fastest models 120 , or even 240 fps) to get zeroed in. And in between EACH of those images you need a small incremental change in focus to make the system able to figure out if it's doing the right thing, or it needs to go in the other direction.
Setting up a predictive system means that all parts have to play together, AND be calibrated as a system. Otherwise it just doesn't work.
.............
But, let's turn the question and doubt in the other direction, shall we?
Isn't it just GREAT that Sigma now allows you to make even their F1.4 lenses focus perfectly with your out-of-whack worthless-piece-of-misaligned-crap camera body?
It puzzles me why a big company like Sigma (or Nikon) is not able to develop and make lenses that deliver sharp pictures straight from the box. Obviously their AF-design sucks or they don't want to spend more time and money to get it right. Instead the customer has to do it, but now with a fancy box.
I really can't understand why you (and many others) just accept this.
Have you wondered why Nikon and Canon offer the ability to fine tune a lens? IMO, camera costs would sky-rocket if cameras and lenses where produced with tolerances that are not only are true out of the box, but true after the cameras and lenses have been used 100Ks of times. I'm certain the weight of the cameras would also go up. Also, I would prefer to fix a lens issue in a few minutes rather than sending the lens and camera into the manufacturers.
Don't look to any mass produced item if you are looking for perfection.
For whatever reason, Sigma cannot satisfy some people irrespective of what the company does. For those of us who use the company's products, lenses to be specific, its efforts to improve the quality and usage of the end product are appreciated.
dsr1 wrote:
I don't think Sigma had saving labor by letting the customer do their adjustment work for them in mind as a cost saving strategy though. They increased the quality of an already good lens to very good by this new technology. I may be wrong but aren't some of the OOF problems camera specific and not necessarily caused by the lens it self?
My argument is only correct if giving the customer this tool allows Sigma to keep costs down by not having to be more critical of their own manufacturing tolerances. I suspect that's true to a degree, but yes, camera tolerances are absolutely part of the equation as well. I think James R summed it up well in his last post.
galenapass wrote:
Apparently Roger's knowledgeable post - above - was lost on you.
Which was that?
Was it the one where he stated you get what you pay for with bogus third party lenses or the one where sigma is too cheap and lazy to even test their lenses at the factory?
They could run out to best buy to get a couple nikon bodies if they had to.
I can't wait to hear about "bricked" sigma lenses from their silly firmware cable.
If they were really clever, they'd have an adjustment feature on the lense itself. You'd hit a button and set the offset with liveview, no dicking around with stupid overpriced cables, crappy japanese software and computers.
The only thing we need is to be able to set a live view focusing value as the zero value of the AF fine-tuning value.
That's all we need and it should be perfectly doable within current cameras.
Instead we have to take comparison charts, download the pictures and do the work manually.
Also, they prefer to sell gadgets and to let us get crazy with AF-fine-tuning-holy-crap values.
G.
That discussion has been up several times, and I've also spoken to quite prominent people at both Canon and Nikon about it. The counter-argument (to "making an AF-adjust and calibration cycle" built into camera fw) is always that the few customers that f*ck things up will make so much noise that the function will run a risk of actually losing them money.
At lest they would not MAKE more money from increased sales, after deducting the development costs, the added educational material in the manual, walk-throughs and so on.
After spending quite some time in both hard- and software development myself, I can gladly accept the view that "all customers are either idiots or ignorant, anything that can go wrong will go wrong when they try it". It's painfully close to the truth. You have to weigh that, and the noise the idiots will make, against the potential for increased sales. In this case that margin is rather low.
My counterargument to that is that you could put the function in one of the existing soft "service modes", where you have to follow a certain procedure to make the camera show certain menu alternatives, shut off all noise reductions, put all of the image into the raw file and so on.
......................
But even in that very boxed-in scenario, I'd put VERY good money on someone doing it to the letter of the instructions, but against a blue/black target in cold WB light temperature, with a lens with bad LoCA. During the FIRST day after the release...
This would throw the adjustment so far out that it would be catastrophically misfocusing in any normal photography case. And that person would run up and down every internet publicity forum known to man, blog about it, call service engineers and throw a fit at them - and so on.
