Hi John,
I respect and thank you for your opinion. I, too, look forward to there being a result database on the Reikan web site - but having "read the tea leaves" after several communications with FoCal's developer, I wouldn't hold my breath... Frankly, I hope that Reikan is going to fix all the bugs with the current version and add a little polish to it before attempting any major new developments. It's FAR from being a production-worthy application at the present time.

The forum thread that was started under this D800 forum, grew so large than the Moderators HAD to close it down after it reached 235 posts. Although I am not privvy to their detailed thoughts, it rather looks as if we might end up with a main "Testing" forum with some subsidiaries. I am guessing, but the subsidiaries might well relate to the particular tool/application used to gather data. Therefore YES, I definitely envisage LensAlign, FoCal and any other tools that become available, having equal billing. Eric Bowles was the first Moderator to get involved. He may be leading the effort to determine the best approach for the community. This data clearly doesn't belong under any one camera body, nor lens type.

Apart from using the tool(s) to help optimise my own body+lens combinations, my personal interest is in the general problem of defining test methodologies, that can be easily reproduced by fellow Nikonians, and used to arrive at reliably comparable results. Without result reproduceability, measuring tools are not viable - and the jury is still out regarding FoCal.

This isn't just about finding the best FT values for a particular lens on a given body. I feel that a large part is about you and I being able to quantify image sharpness with easy-to-run tests whose results are reliable.

Larry Jordan is by far the most experienced member of our little group but the rest of us are gaining speed. We are carefully scrutinising results that should be closely comparable and trying to understand how differences in test methodology affect results. We are testing the effectiveness of a detailed checklist that we can ALL use to minimise result differences for nominally the same hardware. Hopefully, we will be able to share some useful results quite soon.

Although, as someone observed, there may only have been around 20 regular contributors to the previous thread, I'd love to know how many Nikonians "subscribed" to it. I'd be surprised if that statistic isn't available to Moderators... Eric?

With regards,

Pete