eric_koegler

<p>I've been having problems auto focusing the 85mm 1.4g. I bought a copy locally. Tested it at home that night. Took a hundred shots and determined it was defective. It was typically front focusing by roughly a couple of inches at a focal distance of 10 feet.</p>

<p>I return it the next morning. That afternoon, they call me back, saying they tested it and said it was fine. I went to the store, watched them test it, and did some tests of my own. It did front focus a few times, which they saw, but when doing tripod tests, three out of four shots were pretty good. This shouldn't have been good enough to convince me, but it was. So I bought it again, and tested it for a couple of weeks. Almost all shots in a typical indoor family setting were slightly out of focus. Enough to where I tried everything to take crisp auto-focus shots with it, but had minimal success. Mostly front focusing still, but a bit inconsistent.</p>

<p>So I return it again and ask for another copy. A couple weeks later, another copy arrives. That was yesterday. So I test it in the same way I tested the other one, which was mostly typical indoor family shots, and am frustrated to find the same thing. Front focusing. I tried the AF Fine Tune and it helps at about +15. But it's still inconsistent enough for that to be an unacceptable solution. (Not to mention, you don't expect to have to compensate for manufacturing variances when dealing with highly regarded equipment like this.)</p>

<p>So after reading through this thread, I tried Live View. Live View seems to be much better, but I need to do more controlled testing.</p>

<p>My 24-70 2.8g and 105 2.8g are much more positive and accurate with focusing (albeit at f2.8 it has moredepth of field). My 35 1.4g is also much more positive and accurate with focusing, even at f1.4 (albeit at 35mm it has more depth of field). As far as I'm concerned, those three lenses are "perfect" and I really expected the 85 1.4g to have those characteristics.</p>

<p>The body is a D700 with firmware 1.02. I'm using continuous focus, with the center "pip"(?). I've tried the other pips with similar results. For the brief test in the store, we used their body as well and noticed "okay" focusing with roughly 25% front focusing by "a little bit" (where the target focus point was mostly in focus, but the focus zone (depth of field) was mostly in front of the target, with the sharpest point being in front of the target).</p>

<p>I did almost all of my testing on f1.4. When I did some limited testing on f2.8 it was still front focusing, although it became less of an issue because the target focal point would be included in the focused range due to increased depth of field.</p>

<p>Another interesting bit, which may not be relevant, but when I display the focus point on playback, the pip the indicates the focal point is not exactly where my target focus pip was. It's off by about one pip height. I just checked that with one of my other lenses and it looks similar.</p>

<p>Another thing is that the AF "hunts" more than I would expect. Even occasionally on a tripod aimed at a simple stationary object.</p>

<p>What tests would you recommend? I got some good ideas from this thread. I'll try tripod test at close, medium and long focal distances, f1.4, f2.8 and f5.6, different lighting conditions, shutter speeds, AF, live view and manual focus.</p>

<p>Or is this all just a waste of time? Should I just return it? Did I really get two bad copies and the third will be a charm? I believe so, but I'm trying as hard as I can to convince myself that the lens is good, and that I'll simply figure it out. If I conclude it's bad, I want to be absolutely sure and have a repeatable and obvious case when I return the lens.</p>

<p>I'm tempted to get the last gen 1.4 or even the 1.8. But I'm a big fan of the Nano Crystal Coat.</p>

<p>(Sorry for hijacking the thread. I wasn't sure if I should have posted this separately. My issue sounds quite similar.)</p>

<p>I can post pictures later after more controlled tests.</p>

<p>Thanks for the helpful suggestions. I bought the radiopopper JrX studio kit and RPcube. It's exactly what I was looking for. I haven't done any more than shoot a few test shots, but it definitely passed the initial test with flying colors.<br>

In case anyone wants a bit of info on my setup...<br>

I have a D700 with an SB-600. And now I have the radiopopper JrX transmitter and JrX studio receiver. (I believe the non-studio receiver does work as a remote trigger doesn't allow power adjustment of the remote flash from the central location--which eliminates its primary distinguishing feature in my perspective.)<br>

Mount the transmitter on my camera hot-shoe. No cables. No menu systems on the transceiver. No use of your camera's menu system. Just three simple dials to control the power of three groups of remote flashes. Ahhh, so simple. Brilliant.<br>

Mount the RPcube on the bottom of the flash (like it's a hot shoe), and plug the receiver into the RPcube. Just turn the flash on in TTL mode.<br>

You're ready to shoot. Take a pic and the remote flash fires. Adjust the power output of the remote flash just by rotating a dial on the transmitter on the top of my camera. I can make a meaningful adjustment in less time than it takes for the flash to recycle--just a couple of second.<br>

Brilliant design.<br>

I can't speak for reliability or anything yet because I haven't had it long enough. I'm concerned that it might eat batteries. I believe the transmitter and receiver take CR123 batteries and I heard somewhere they might only last 40 hours. But that's a small concern in the grand scheme of things.<br>

Now I just need to find a cost effective powerful TTL flash. As weird as it sounds, even thought I'm all Nikon, it doesn't matter if the TTL flash is Nikon compatible or Canon compatible. Any recommendations are appreciated. No need for Nikon or Canon brand in this case. I won't be using any of the bells and whistles. Just consistent, reliable, powerful, quick TTL flashes. I suppose I'll start another thread for that. I can't seem to find what I'm looking for on photo.net or google.</p>

<p>How can I control the manual power output of my off-camera SB-600, SB-800 or SB-900 using RF?</p>

<p>I'm currently using the pop-up flash on my D700 in commander mode. It has all the functionality I need, except it relies on light (RF?) to communicate. This limits where I can place the remote flash. It also seems to be fickle depending on brightness of ambient light and where reflective surfaces are.</p>

<p>Here's what I want to do. D700 on tripod. Three SB-600's placed around the scene. SB-600's in remote mode, manual output mode. From my location at the camera, I want to control the SB-600s' output manually. No cables, no light communication (IR or visible), no walking to flash. It doesn't matter if I have to use the camera menu or an external device.</p>

<p>I don't need any automatic metering--neither from the camera nor any of the flashes. Everything in manual mode.</p>

<p>As far as I can tell, there are several solutions that act exclusively as triggers, but none that allow control. I see that PocketWizard has been working a Nikon solution for a long time, but it looks like this is a fancy solution with broad iTTL functionality. I'm not sure if that's what I need, since I don't care about metering and automatic anything.</p>

<p>I'm interested in almost the exact same question. Is a D700 + 105mm f/2.8G a reasonable solution to digitize color slides? That's the starting point for my question because I have a D700 and I'm about to get the 105mm in a week. I'm considering buying a local used 55mm micro with PK-13 tube just because I've heard that works well. I haven't heard much on the 105 for this application. For my application, I plan on doing 70-140 slides per session, ~2000 slides total.<br>

1. Tommy Lee, what do you mean by "A 55mm micro Nikkor (in reverse) with a bellow may be better then a 105 micro VR doing this job." I'm very interested in the difference between these two options for this application.<br>

2. Isn't a camera/lens system much faster than a scanner? (Assume doing batch jobs of 70-140 color slides per session. I have to admit that I haven't used a scanner in a while, but they used to be very slow at high resolutions. (Scanner=minutes, camera/lens=seconds??)<br>

3. What's the real story between the quality of results between camera/lens and scanner? It seems like most references I see indicate that scanner quality is always higher quality than camer/lens. Why? If I use a high quality 1:1 macro lens (e.g., Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G micro) with a high quality camera (e.g., D700), shouldn't that be close to ideal? At least in terms of size of file/pixels/resolution, I can't imagine that a 100MB file from a scanner offers any more actual quality. Yes, it might have more resolution, but to capture what details? Were the lenses and cameras from 30 years ago (age of my slides) that much better, so that a high resolution scanner is necessary to capture the original detail? Or is that excess? In fact, in my limited perspective, it seems like that argument is even superfluous. If my camera/lens combo is of high enough quality for shooting typical subjects, why wouldn't it be good enough for copying color slides? I would understand if quality concerns on the camera/lens came down to lens qualities (e.g., spherical and chromic aberrations, fall-off or vignetting, distortion). But again, if these qualities are good enough for typical subjects, why wouldn't it be good enough for slide copying.<br>

(I'm pretty new to these forums. Is it best to ask these kinds of follow-up questions in-line in relevant existing topics, or to start a new topic?)</p>

<p>Thanks, Gerard, for the a4 "Focus tracking with lock-on" comments.<br>

It looks like Gerard indicated that a4 can be detrimental to dynamic tracking of moving subjects that are not temporarily obscured. I did some testing on stationary subjects that are not temporarily obscured. My informal testing shows that as this setting is "decreased" from Long to Normal to Short to Off, the continuous AF focuses more quickly on a new subject.<br>

In other words, while in continuous AF mode, single point AF, a4 on long, there were long delays (1s) when focusing on a new subject (e.g., quickly panning from something close to something far) (with shutter-release button pressed halfway or AF-ON pressed).<br>

These are far from comprehenisve results, but I'm drawing a personal conclusion that a4 causes challenges in tracking dynamic subjects that aren't temporarily obscured, and causes delays in focusing on new subjects. So while a4 might be handy for maintianing focus on a bear running through trees, I haven't found it to be a useful solution to any of my needs.</p>