FoCal 4.1 brings support for the Nikon Zf (including Snapshots), improves operation of FoCal on Windows, improves the startup experience and fixes several bugs.

How to get FoCal 4.1

FoCal 4.1 is available to everyone within their support period as of 9th March 2024 (so that’s everyone who’s purchased FoCal or a new Included Updates Period since 9th November 2023).

You can download it by logging in to your FoCal Account and choosing the download for your platform.

What’s New in FoCal 4.1

• Support for the Nikon Zf
• Text filtering in Snapshots tool
• Camera support improvements and fixes
• Smaller installer and better interface on Windows
• Core Updates
• Help Improvements
• Bug fixes

Support for the Nikon Zf

We’ve been waiting for Nikon to release some important documentation for this camera, but as yet they’ve failed to do so (this has been the case with a few select cameras in the past – the Z fc and Z 30 being examples, and there’s no clear reason why).

But that won’t stop us adding support to FoCal! We’ve got years of experience in this area, and a whole suite of tools to develop support for new cameras.

We’ve decided to get one of these in-house at Reikan (rather than borrowing from the extremely helpful Nikon UK team) – this means we’ve been able to spend a good amount of time with the camera and added support for almost all features.

You can perform full Autofocus Calibration, run a Calibration Check, use MultiTest to get a full view of your lens focus and aperture performance, use Dust Analysis to check your sensor, as well as getting Autofocus Consistency and Aperture Sharpness results.

The full Snapshots functionality is available too, allowing you to capture a large number of the settings available on the camera, edit and store, share and import, output as a PDF document, convert between cameras and more!

I said almost all, as there’s one particular test that isn’t yet supported on the Zf – the Stabilisation Test. We can run it in our development builds, but due to the manual dials on the camera and what I believe is a bug in the Nikon code, we can’t control some settings and still allow you to see through the viewfinder… whcih makes the test somewhat difficult to use! We’re working on bring the Stabilisation Test to the Zf soon – there are a few potential workarounds that can be done if Nikon don’t fix the bug, so watch this space.

Note that the Nikon Zf isn’t yet supported in the mobile apps (FoCal Mobile and FoCal Snapshots), but we’ll be adding this very shortly.

Snapshots Improvements

We’ve added a text filter option to the Snapshots too – highlighted below. Click the button to open the text entry panel, then any text you enter must appear in the name of the settings – in the example below, entering “pri” filters out “Primary Slot”, “Focus AF-C priority selection” etc.

Camera Support Fixes

We’ve fixed some bugs in the metadata processor in FoCal which were causing some issues with decoding some focus information from the Nikon Zf, as well as the Z8 and Z9 with the latest firmware.

There are also some fixes in our Camera Database, which defines capabilities and features of cameras.

The Raw Processor has been updates to support the latest cameras – unfortunately not the High Efficiency coding of the latest Nikon mirrorless cameras, but you can still run Raw mode tests if you choose any other raw format on these cameras.

Windows Improvements

We’ve replaced out user-interface component with the native one included within Windows, which has reduced the size of our installer by about 150MB! It should also improve compatibility within Windows, and will be kept up to date by Windows Update itself, so you’ll always be using the latest component within FoCal.

Core Updates

FoCal 4.1 brings yet more updates to our core framework, fixing some recent security vulnerabilities and improving performance.

Improved Help

We’ve added Tips and Quickstart to FoCal.

Tips

Tips are a collection of useful hints which you can open at any time – they link to features in FoCal or to the help pages so you can get a quick entry to more information.

Quickstart

More geared towards new users, Quickstart takes you to appropriate help to show you how to get going with FoCal.

You can open it at any timefrom the Help menu.

Bug Fixes

There’s always bugs to fix, and we’ve fixed a few in this release. These are mostly minor user-interface fixes, but there are also a few camera control fixes to make operation more reliable.

Operating System Support

See below for information about which versions of operating system are supported.

Release Notes

There are more details in the changelog in the release notes for this release.

Thank you!

Thank you to all our users past and present who’ve used FoCal for their calibrations. An extra special thank you to everyone who’s got in touch with feedback, a lot of changes are driven directly by what you tell us!

Get Reikan FoCal 4.1

FoCal 4.1 is available to all users within their Included Updates Period as of 9th March 2024. You can get the software as shown below:

• By logging in to the FoCal Account system via www.reikanfocal.com/account
• Go to the About > Update Check option in the software. From here you can hit the Download button to get the software.

If you’re outside of the period above you can purchase 12 months of updates by logging in to the account system via www.reikanfocal.com/account and scrolling to Included Updates Period.

If you’re not yet a FoCal user, you can purchase the software as a download or boxed product, as well as FoCal Hard Targets from the FoCal Online Store.

Get FoCal Apps

Information and store links for the FoCal mobile apps are available here:

• FoCal Mobile
• FoCal Snapshots

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