Focus peaking v. magnification

William Porter wrote:

You just started using focus peaking while I've had it available (and have been fiddling with it) for years, but my considered conclusion is the same as your first impression: magnification is more useful than peaking.

I use peaking only when I'm shooting with a manual-focus only lens and I'm shooting stuff that moves too fast for me to keep up with it. In that case I'll want to stop down the aperture to get more depth of field (to give myself some margin for error). But I don't shoot like this very often at all. I generally reserve my manual focus lenses for portrait work where I'm in no particular hurry about focus. And then I use magnification. With magnification, I can nail the focus on the subject's eyeball every time.

If I've got an autofocus lens and the subject is moving and I don't want to focus manually, I get better results letting the camera take care of the focus than I do using peaking. And I have to confess something. After being a manual focus guy much of my life, the E-M1's face detect autofocus is so good I'm starting to reconsider.

My experience, for what it's worth. But if somebody else gets good results from peaking, that's terrific. It's nice to have both options!

Will

Will -- Thanks for giving your experience -- it's worth a lot as I am just starting out using these features.  It seems the use of FP is somewhat a matter of taste, style, and familiarity, but it's good to know that the reason I'm finding magnification more useful isn't necessarily just because I'm doing it wrong!

I will try using FP for moving subjects (I have two at home to experiment on), something I hadn't considered before.