Focus peaking.
I have talked about this before. No tests are made of it. No reviewer goes much beyond saying that this or that camera has focus peaking as if they are all the same, they are not.
Ricoh seems to my limited experience to have the two best methods of focus peaking in the business.
Ricoh's system:
Both modes: can be constantly live if switched on - even useful in auto focus where dof can usually be judged as well as the various item in the frame that are in focus - not just "a bunch of highlighted squares". Scaling - Ricoh's focus peaking scales with magnification and therefore always seems usefully right.
Mode1 when in use is not over-intrusive and can be usefully kept in place when "not using" focus peaking.
There is a choice of styles.
It is useful from unmagnified screen right through to full magnification.
Ricoh's focus peaking assist in both versions is so good that its qualities should be screamed from the hilltops to the masses. And yet not even Ricoh-mavins make much out of it.
In my experience other camera users blandly talk about focus peaking as being terribly good, simply because their camera "has it" and they have no way of comparing what the Ricoh version offers.
When I heard that Sony had focus peaking in the NEX, I naturally thought that it would be something similar to that in the Ricoh cameras. It even has the ability to change the thickness of the highlights and the highlighted colour can also be changed.
The let down of course is that these facilities are very necessary. Oh yes Sony focus peaking is good and very handy, it does work. At a normal view the thick lines are so visibly thick that it is hard to tell the precise focus, magnify the screen and they disappear! Sorry, not thick enough appareently, make them thicker - Sony does not appear to scale the focus peaking highlights to the screen magnificaton. Luckily their magnified screen is very precise and clear and eye-driven manual focus is easy even when focus peaking disappears. No focus peaking on auto focus, but I guess it is not really needed and might be doubtful if the "ink-blot" effect of Sony focus peaking on normal image view would go down well with auto focus. Hey, and soft-press the shutter button and the magnified view terminates and has to be re-invoked. How good is that?
Therefore I am a bit puzzled by Sony's implementation of focus peaking. Sometimes it works well, but it would seem that the line thickness needs to be manually changed depending on the lens used - one thickness might work well for wide lenses and another for telephoto. One thickness, just rigth for magnified view is blotchy-thick in nomal view. Therefore the best use might come from further experience. However from what I have seen over the last month the Sony focus peaking has a long long way to go before it is a pale shadow of what Ricoh offers.
My only other direct experience is on the Pentax Q - here Ricoh's Mode1 would work well but it is only usefully good to about 2x screen magification, but this is an lcd screen resolution problem more than it is any fault in Ricoh's firmware technology.
So others might comment on the focus peaking used my other manufacturers - is it any good? Or is Ricoh truly the only company with a real handle on the technique and all others talk focus peaking in their cameras as if it were merely another method of counting pixels. To have it is good even if it is far from the best implementation.
Ricoh owners feel free to criticise Ricoh over outdated this and that and including the inevitable sensor thrashing. But no one seems to acknowledge that Ricoh's focus peaking assist is the very best in the business.
--
Tom Caldwell
I have talked about this before. No tests are made of it. No reviewer goes much beyond saying that this or that camera has focus peaking as if they are all the same, they are not.
Ricoh seems to my limited experience to have the two best methods of focus peaking in the business.
Ricoh's system:
Both modes: can be constantly live if switched on - even useful in auto focus where dof can usually be judged as well as the various item in the frame that are in focus - not just "a bunch of highlighted squares". Scaling - Ricoh's focus peaking scales with magnification and therefore always seems usefully right.
Mode1 when in use is not over-intrusive and can be usefully kept in place when "not using" focus peaking.
There is a choice of styles.
It is useful from unmagnified screen right through to full magnification.
Ricoh's focus peaking assist in both versions is so good that its qualities should be screamed from the hilltops to the masses. And yet not even Ricoh-mavins make much out of it.
In my experience other camera users blandly talk about focus peaking as being terribly good, simply because their camera "has it" and they have no way of comparing what the Ricoh version offers.
When I heard that Sony had focus peaking in the NEX, I naturally thought that it would be something similar to that in the Ricoh cameras. It even has the ability to change the thickness of the highlights and the highlighted colour can also be changed.
The let down of course is that these facilities are very necessary. Oh yes Sony focus peaking is good and very handy, it does work. At a normal view the thick lines are so visibly thick that it is hard to tell the precise focus, magnify the screen and they disappear! Sorry, not thick enough appareently, make them thicker - Sony does not appear to scale the focus peaking highlights to the screen magnificaton. Luckily their magnified screen is very precise and clear and eye-driven manual focus is easy even when focus peaking disappears. No focus peaking on auto focus, but I guess it is not really needed and might be doubtful if the "ink-blot" effect of Sony focus peaking on normal image view would go down well with auto focus. Hey, and soft-press the shutter button and the magnified view terminates and has to be re-invoked. How good is that?
Therefore I am a bit puzzled by Sony's implementation of focus peaking. Sometimes it works well, but it would seem that the line thickness needs to be manually changed depending on the lens used - one thickness might work well for wide lenses and another for telephoto. One thickness, just rigth for magnified view is blotchy-thick in nomal view. Therefore the best use might come from further experience. However from what I have seen over the last month the Sony focus peaking has a long long way to go before it is a pale shadow of what Ricoh offers.
My only other direct experience is on the Pentax Q - here Ricoh's Mode1 would work well but it is only usefully good to about 2x screen magification, but this is an lcd screen resolution problem more than it is any fault in Ricoh's firmware technology.
So others might comment on the focus peaking used my other manufacturers - is it any good? Or is Ricoh truly the only company with a real handle on the technique and all others talk focus peaking in their cameras as if it were merely another method of counting pixels. To have it is good even if it is far from the best implementation.
Ricoh owners feel free to criticise Ricoh over outdated this and that and including the inevitable sensor thrashing. But no one seems to acknowledge that Ricoh's focus peaking assist is the very best in the business.
--
Tom Caldwell
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One note, I found the full screen magnified view to be the most accurate.