Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ll have heard of the new Sigma 18-35mm F1.8 DC HSM A lens that’s now available. This is a really exciting lens as it’s the first to have a such a wide fixed aperture of f/1.8 across the whole zoom range. We had an opportunity to do a …
Focus Shift is a phenomenon which affects certain lenses and causes the point of focus to shift with a change in aperture. This post takes a look at why that matters, and some results from development testing of Reikan FoCal which allows the effect of focus shift to be quantified. Why does Focus Shift matter? …
This is just a quick post to show early development of a new feature in FoCal – the ability to test at both ends of a zoom lens and have the results interpreted for the best single result (or best dual results for cameras capable of accepting these): FoCal 1.9 is mainly focused on stability …
FoCal 1.0 was launched on 2nd January 2012, and since then there has been 8 major updates (free of charge), bringing the automated support from 2 to 20 cameras (and growing!), further operating system support and new tests and improvements to the overall software. We wanted to show how things have progressed over the last …
The last post about our HyperDoF refocusable image builder was our first about some of the research and development projects we do here at Reikan, but I wanted to tell you about another idea that we’ve been playing around with in the background – FoCal over WiFi! The Raspberry Pi If you don’t know about …
At Reikan, we like to tinker around with research and development projects in order to break new ground in the areas of camera control and image processing. HyperDoF is the result of some research we did back in February 2012 based on FoCal, and is a utility which allows you to create images you can …
Reikan FoCal software has the ability to run AF Consistency tests, and during the development of some new features in FoCal I noticed something about contrast detect autofocus that didn’t quite go with my expectations, so I’ve run a few tests and captured some quite interesting data. This all stems from my belief that contrast-detect …
For quite a few months now, FoCal has had a Data Upload feature which has meant that people who use FoCal can optionally upload their data back to us at Reikan so we can analyse the results. The plan has been to use this data to both improve the analysis and guidance in FoCal, and also …
Several months ago, we introduced a Data Upload function into FoCal. This allows users to choose to upload their test results to Reikan, which was intended to give us an opportunity to start to look for patterns in camera and lens behaviour, so we could highlight possible issues, make FoCal better and also give the …
The Mac version of FoCal is coming on very nicely, and we’re preparing for a public Beta release for FoCal Pro users within the next few days (keep an eye out!). Right now, we’re doing some final tests and creating the OSX version of the manual. In doing so, we have to run all the …