Blog Archives

You NEED to tune your DSLR autofocus!

Image of FoCalCam-3000 with some light rays

I try my very best to avoid making statements that I can’t back up, so I’m going to do just that for the following one: “You are almost certainly not getting the sharpest shots from your DSLR – and it’s not your fault!” What if I then told you there’s an easy fix? Read on …


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Mirrorless AF Calibration – Part 6: The Evidence

A selection of charts shown on glass blocks against a brown background.

This is the culmination of a series of posts about how the whole autofocus system works and what issues might still lead to a requirement to calibrate lenses even though the autofocus measurements are now obtained from the same sensor as the image is captured from. I’ll link back to the previous posts at various …


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Mirrorless AF Calibration – Part 5: The Autofocus Processor

Lens, sensor and AF Processor render

In previous posts, I’ve covered issues that might affect the AF Sensor and the Lens. The last part of the Autofocus System is the AF Processor – the brains behind the whole operation. When I talk about the AF Processor, I’m talking about a conceptual block of functionality – It may be a dedicated chip …


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Mirrorless AF Calibration – Part 3: On-Sensor Phase-Detect Issues

Two microlenses and masks and colour filter arrays

In part 2, we covered the operation of the AF sensor, so now it’s time to take a look at some potential problems that could occur at the sensor which may affect the sharpness of our final images. This post will specifically look at issues relating to the phase-detection process occurring on the image sensor, …


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Mirrorless AF Calibration – Part 2: On-Sensor Phase Detect Autofocus

A number of sensels complete with masks and colour filters and light rays.

Overview Autofocus (AF) technology has revolutionised the world of photography, allowing photographers to capture sharp images quickly and consistently. One of the most popular and widely used autofocus technologies is Phase Detect Autofocus (PDAF). In this blog post, I’ll delve into the inner workings of PDAF so we have a solid foundation for understanding why …


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Mirrorless AF Calibration – Part 1: You SHOULD Calibrate your Mirrorless Autofocus!

Render of AF Fine-tune options on glass panels.

“Mirrorless cameras don’t need calibrating.” You hear that a lot, but is it true? At Reikan, we’ve been gathering autofocus calibration results for almost 10 years now from users of our FoCal software, which includes data from users of Nikon Z-series mirrorless cameras… and it suggests that you should calibrate your mirrorless camera.  I wanted …


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