It’s here! Our 4th major release of FoCal is now available for everyone, bringing improved performance and compatibility (including native Apple Silicon support), analysis improvements, camera and lens database enhancements, security updates and lots more…

Our first release of FoCal all the way back at the beginning of 2012 supported autofocus tuning for just 2 cameras – the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and the EOS 7D. FoCal 4.0 supports full, automatic autofocus tuning for:

• 19 Canon DSLRs and 25 Nikon DSLRs
• 10 Nikon mirrorless cameras

Add in Aperture Sharpness testing, Dust Analysis, 2D focus/aperture testing with MultiTest, Stabilisation System analysis, Autofocus Consistency, FoCal Comparison Data to see how your kit performs, and more, and you’ve got yourself FoCal 4.0!

How to get FoCal 4.0

FoCal 4.0 is available to everyone within their support period as of 20th November 2023 (so that’s everyone who’s purchased FoCal Pro or a new Included Updates Period since 20th November 2022).

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

What’s new in FoCal 4.0?

• Brand new underlying frameworks
• Analysis Improvements
• Integrated USB control
• Camera control updates
• User interface improvements
• New installer

Brand New Frameworks

When a project as complex as FoCal starts life, a set of tools and frameworks are chosen on which to build, and the decisions made in the early days can impact the product for many years.

What we’ve done recently is update all of the underlying frameworks so that we’re using the latest available tools and features, and this brings a whole host of benefits.

Huge Performance Improvements

The new frameworks have been written from the ground up for the latest hardware and take advantage of new features to bring substantial performance improvements.

The end result is that all FoCal tests will run faster and use less resources and power.

Self-contained Code

There’s no more requirement to install any extra libraries or frameworks to make sure FoCal will work – everything needed is contained in one package.

This completely removes the risk of supporting libraries not being installed or not of the correct version, which should get rid of any niggly installation problems of the past.

Latest Platform Support

FoCal will take full advantage of the latest processors, and soon, we should be able to work natively with Apple Silicon.

Whatever the processor, FoCal 4.0 will get the best from the new features and performance offered.

More secure

As well as a focus on performance, the latest frameworks are up to date with regards to any operating system or processor vulnerabilities. As they are tightly integrated with the operating system, updates to your operating system (e.g. through Windows Update) will keep everything fully secure.

Quicker release time for FoCal

The transition to new tools has allowed us to streamline our release processes, so we should be able to bring you updates faster once all platforms are transitioned to the latest frameworks.

Analysis Improvements

It’s not just the underlying tools that have been updated for FoCal 4.0 – we’ve also made some improvements to how FoCal operates.

Our image analysis algorithm has remained unchanged since around 2014 as it was developed in-house with a lot of testing and tuning and generally works very well. However, there are some edge cases that can affect results under challenging conditions.

We’ve improved how our analysis handles very blurred images and moderate changes to lighting levels during testing, making the results more consistent over a wider range of environmental conditions. The result: FoCal 4.0 gives you more reliable results and is even easier to use!

Integrated USB control

Control of cameras in FoCal (for Windows) has always required an extra component with its own requirements for support libraries, development tools and more. This was a pain to modify and maintain, as well as adding additional prerequisites to the whole FoCal application, meaning some users had to carefully install extra files before FoCal would communicate with cameras.

We’ve moved all our original USB control code into the main FoCal application and worked on some improvements to both performance and functionality, including better detection of camera removal and faster data transfer.

Camera control updates

There are always ways we can improve how we talk to cameras, and following on from the updates to our USB control code, we’ve improved how we communicate with both Nikon and Canon cameras.

There were some situations where FoCal wouldn’t recognise the camera reporting various error states, and these have now been improved, along with the ability for FoCal to resolve most minor issues automatically, making for more reliable testing.

User-interface Improvements

This release isn’t about the look and feel of FoCal, so we’ve kept things mostly the same, although we couldn’t leave it alone altogether!

Like with the underlying frameworks, the component which displays everything you interact with has been updated, improving the graphics and fluidity of the whole application.

We’ve also adjusted some colours to make certain states more obvious, user interface components have been tidied, unnecessary pages removed, and tab pages visually improved. There are a few subtle animations to make the whole experience feel more polished.

New Windows Installer

Our Windows installer has been updated for FoCal 4.0 to bring a cleaner and more consistent installation experience. We tried the new MSIX installer for early betas of FoCal 4, but it seemed to cause more problems than it solved, so now we’re using a more established installer, which gives us a lot more control over the process than the previous FoCal 3.x installer and should get rid of any issues some users saw when upgrading FoCal versions.

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 4.0

FoCal 4.0 is available to all users within their Included Updates Period as of 20th November 2023. 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

Reikan FoCal on Social Media

We regularly post news and updates on social media. You can keep updated, connect and follow us via:

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