And to put that in context, all of those lenses will be producing results between the 10 point error and 20 point error images above! Conclusion Thankfully that number drops quickly, but for around a third of all tested EF lenses you’ve still got a greater than 1 in 10 chance that you’ll need a really big adjustment to get the best from the lens. If you had 10 copies of the EF 28mm f/1.8 lens on your desk, 4 out of 10 of them would likely get a massive improvement after calibration with FoCal! This time, the left side of the chart is a bad place to be. I keep mentioning tiny, small and large calibration differences, but what do these actually look like? The images below show the difference between a well calibrated lens, and an offset of 2 points (barely any noticeable difference), a 10 point error (significantly blurred), and a 20 point error (hugely blurred): That means that even with this more relaxed requirement, nearly 80% of the lenses are more likely to be significantly better after running through FoCal.įor the half of the lenses on the right side of the chart, you’ve got a 2 in 3 chance that you’ll see a decent improvement using FoCal. So now only 1 in 4 lenses will see a significant improvement (remember, the other 3 will probably still see an improvement, just not huge).īut… (there’s always a but!)… only the top 15 lenses have values above 50%. In reality, you’ll usually not notice much of a difference with an adjustment of 2 AF Microadjustment points, so let’s have a look at what happens if you include all the results that need just a tiny amount of calibration:Īgain, starting at the far left, this time it’s the EF 11-24 f/4L that’s best, and our number has jumped to almost 75%. To be honest, we’ve gone for a pretty stringent requirement above of needing a calibration result of 0. more than 9 out of 10 lenses would benefit from calibration!Īnd at the far right, the last 2 lens types( the 85/1.2L and 300/2.8L) could do with calibration for every single copy of this lens! Relax A Little Move a third of the way along the chart (to the 60mm Macro), and you’re down to less than 10%, i.e. Only 1 of the 4 (25%) would not need any calibration. The EF 90-300mm lens has a value of just under 25%… so what does that mean? It means that – on average – if you had 4 of these lenses on the bench in front of you, 3 out of 4 would produce sharper photos if you ran them through FoCal. Let’s start at the very left of the chart. (Note: click on the chart to see a large view) Here’s that data shown for all the Canon EF lenses (ordered from most-likely to least-likely to need no calibration): the AF Microadjustment result from FoCal was 0). We’ve taken all the data and worked out the percentage of each lens type that required no calibration at all (i.e. “When I take that shiny new lens out of the box, what are the chances that I’m going to get the best from it without any adjustment?” How likely is is that a lens needs no adjustment at all? There have been more than 100 different Canon EF lenses produced since 1987, and our database contains high quality information for nearly 90 of these lenses across the 16 different Canon camera bodies supported by FoCal.įor this post, I’m going to use the results to show how likely it is that any particular lens will benefit from calibration. I’ve shown below exactly why it’s a great idea to adjust your lenses with your cameras. This might not come as a massive surprise, but we think it’s a really good idea to calibrate every single lens you own!īut don’t just take our word for it. In a previous post, we looked at the the results of adjustment across all cameras and lenses (Canon and Nikon) supported by FoCal and saw that on average more than 60% of all cameras and lenses would significantly benefit from calibration. In this post, I wanted to take a look in more detail about the real world need for AF Microadjustment on Canon cameras and specifically Canon EF lenses. Over the past 5 years, FoCal users have been uploading their results to our database, and we process this information and feed it back to let them compare how their camera and lens compares with everyone else. Reikan FoCal takes the guesswork out of this adjustment by automating the process and using advanced computer analysis to determine the best adjustment for your camera and lens. Since the introduction of the Canon EOS 1D Mark III way back in 2007, middle to high-end camera owners have been able to adjust the focus system of their camera to work better with each lens.