At full tele and infinity focus issue..

Thanks, Jim Kinsey and samsara!

Hey Jim, I tried to email you a month or two ago but I'm not sure you received the email. I saw your article in one of the trade mags about your Sony PCM-D1 and how it survived hyenas chewing on it, ha! I do hope to make some cool wilderness adventure flicks as well as create some high-def stock footage. I am looking at the PCM-D1 for backcountry audio.
 
Buck,

That was a bad day when I found the PCM D1 crushed by that Hyena but in the end I made lemonade . Sony replaced it for the " user story " and their engineers were in shock that it survived. I missed your email. The PCMD1 is spendy but you get what you pay for. I use Nat sound from Africa, Alaska and many other wilderness places then insert those bites when I need them in my producitons. I am telling you it is one thing that can lift your produciton to the next level.

Send me a private message and I will give you my direct e-mail link.

JK

JK
 
f1dot9fulltele.jpg



Above is my test image, full tele, f1.9 with ND2, 90º shutter. Not really all that sharp anywhere, but equally blurred in the corners, with copious amounts of CA.

In short, as I was telling Stevet privately, the EX1 makes a great wide/medium wide scenic cam, but as for full tele, nothing beats the HVR-V1U. My lunar eclipse shots bear this out. The V1U remains sharp and you can see craters and details on the moon, while the EX1 is blurred and loaded with CA.

On wide shots, the EX1 is unbeatable, whereas the V1U image falls apart.

Bottom line is, match the camera to the application. I'm keeping my V1Us for tele work. With HDMI to some sort of hard drive recorder, that will solve the problems with HDV artifacts. EX1 remains good for general purpose shooting.
 
Thanks Mark.
I agree regarding overall focused detail in your image. I'm not sure if I'm seeing a difference across your entire image.

Could you provide another shot with the focus distance around 60 feet at full tele?

Look at my fishing shot. I nailed center focus at the shore rock line. Granted focus does fall of from center to left. It just falls off worse to the right. Also, I'm seeing worse CA on my right side, although it's present throughout as you mentioned.

Thank you for the image.
 
I'd like to thank Maxim from Aerialsfilm for hosting this image.

The is NOT a rez test. The camera was set from the chart at:

12 ft.
full tele 82mm
f1.9

If you pull back the camera to 15 feet, the results are even worse.
If you focus the target on the left side, the center is a bit out of focus. Maybe normal for this lens under these conditions, but maybe a tad high. If I focus
the target on the right side of the frame, the center is definately further out of focus.

In fact just panning with peaking on and stopping when the target is on the right of the frame, there's NO peaking visable on the target. But, if I pan to the left and stop on the target, peaking can be viewed.
What surprised me was that even with the camera set to f4 under these conditions, the right side can still be seen softer than the left.

http://www.aerialsfilm.com/stevet/Images/Focus_delta_CA_issue.jpg

Any thoughts on this?
 
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Steve,

Man I thought I was losing my mind. Your camera and mine should be joined at the hip. This is the test I wanted to perform but the EX1 is stuck in Nebraska right now. This is a real bummer since I rely on lots of tele work for wildlife and stock footage in general. I may have to shoot everything wide with this camera until Sony comes out with a fix because that is simply unexceptable in my book especially for a camera made by a big name company and big name lens to boot.

JK
 
Well,
I sent my camera in yesterday to have Sony look at this issue.
Sorry to hear your camera has the same issue.

I'd like to see more EX1 users run this test.
 
I just received my camera back for the larger than normal center to right focus difference (focal image plane) on the extreme tele end of the lens.

Cheuk from Sony Service (San Jose) was going to replace the lens. The lens was on back order for another month. Instead he performed an lens alignment.

I'm not sure what this entailed, but the center to edge on the tele end of the lens is now symmetrical.

Also, this adjustment (or possibly another) fixed the small amount of vignetting viewed between 8-25mm. Maybe they were connected.

I have not confirmed if CA is improved on the tele end, but it was worse on the right side at the tele end along with the soft right side at this point, so it may also now be at least symetrical across the image.

Back focus was never really bad on my camera. Cheuk also said he upgraded the software to 1.05. I'm going to confirm this today, but I imagine he did. He said he performed the back focus cal. BF looks good at all ND settings ON or OFF. It may be just a tad out, but it seems somewhat subjective, so it's probably fine.

I have the extended warranty so I'm waitng to have the paint peeling on the back panel lettering issue addressed.
 
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