Tuesday, January 25, 2011

LensAlign

I've seen and read about enough problems with camera and lens calibration to finally put a post up here about it.  I've had issues with it myself that finally necessitated sending my whole Canon rig (including lenses) back to Canon twice to get it fixed.  It's frustrating, no doubt about it.

Mass produced cameras and lenses at any price point are manufactured within a certain quality tolerance.  As the following two articles concisely point out, these tolerances can sometimes combine to work against you and you'll end up with slightly out of focus images.
  1. The Simple Solution to Back-Focus and Front-Focus Problems
  2. Are Your Pictures Out Of Focus?
I've read about many ways to microfocus adjust your camera/lenses on the internet if your camera has that function, and one of the more reputable methods is posted at this link.  The problem with this method is that depending on how you set it up, you can get widely variable and unrepeatable results.  Not good...

So what can you do about this?  As mentioned in the articles above, other than sending your whole camera rig back to your camera manufacturer (which you can't do if you use third party lenses), the main choice for repeatable consistent testing seems to be LensAlign.

Since I'm now using several third party lenses instead of Canon's, I plan to purchase the LensAlign MkII product for $80 to try it out on at least two of my lenses that I think I have some problems with.  I'll post my results here...

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