TCON-17 setting on the XZ-1

Brian Chichester wrote:

Thank you for your thoughts on IS. I'm not an expert on the sensor-shift technology in the XZ-1, but my understanding is that the mechanism senses camera movement and makes a compensating movement to the necessary extent. Increasing the focal length parameter means that the mechanism is allowed more latitude to move, but not that it has to move to its maximum latitude on every exposure.

How much it moves is always dependent on focal length, not just the maximum that it can move. It is compensating not for the physical movement of the camera, but for the movement of the image projected from the lens onto the sensor. To understand this, you can switch off IS, zoom the lens to its widest, and tilt the camera up and down about a millimetre, observing how much the image moves on the LCD screen. Now do the same movement at full telephoto. See how much further it moves? That's what the sensor shift mechanism is compensating for.

That's why cameras with interchangeable lenses require you to input the focal length of a lens if it doesn't communicate it to the camera. Many people have commented on this forum over the past 14 years since the feature was introduced with issues that ended up being caused by them telling the camera they were using a longer focal length than they actually were.

In my set-up, the difference between the camera's calculated focal length and the actual one is around 10%, so It's not going to matter much one way or the other.

12% over-correction will give you worse results than 50% under-correction. You can do a test to see for yourself. It may be subtle enough to not be recognizable as motion blur, but side-by-side comparisons can reveal that your photos are simply less sharp than they should be. Don't judge the performance of the conversion lens until you rule it out. IS disabled, on a tripod, using the self timer, is a good way to eliminate the variable of camera movement.