What’s New in This Update

Welcome to FoCal 2.9! This is the General Availability release of FoCal 2.9 for all users, and represents the culmination of over 18 months of development work bringing improvements to every aspect of Reikan FoCal.

Version Details

General “headline” features since the last release are shown below, with more details available in the changelog. For more information you can also see the release blog post.

What's New

New look to the UI

When you connect to a camera, FoCal now obtains much more information about the camera and shows this to you in the Camera/Lens Info panel

Camera control improvements

During the development of FoCal 2.9, we have reworked almost every aspect of the software. One area that has received a lot of attention is how the cameras are controlled.

With FoCal 2.6.5 on Mac we completely changed the communication with Canon cameras, and now we bring this change to Windows too. This means faster, more reliable communications with more flexibility of what we can do with the cameras.

Improvements to both Canon and Nikon control mean that going forward we’ll be bringing some exciting new features!

64 bit macOS

One of the primary drivers for the rework in FoCal 2.9 was Apple’s requirement that all macOS apps should be 64-bit. Over the past few versions, macOS has been periodically letting you know...

From our point of view, this necessitated the change to a new, far more modern software framework for FoCal which brings a whole host of benefits.

Not only will the app run faster and be more compact on macOS, but the code is far more common between Windows and Mac, leading to improved reliability as we pick up more issues during release testing.

Support for the Nikon Z6/Z7 Mirrorless Cameras

Nikon’s exciting new mirrorless cameras - the Z6 and Z7 - have been supported in the beta builds of FoCal 2.9 for a while, but we now bring them to everyone with this general availability release of FoCal 2.9!

Online Context-Sensitive Help

FoCal is a complex product, and up until this version it camera with a complex manual - 150 pages of details! We realised this can be a bit intimidating… and so it isn’t usually read, leading to lots of questions.

So we’ve brought the information to where it’s needed, with context sensitive online help.

Hit the “?” key from lots of places in FoCal to get information about what you’re looking at.

Within the tests, use the Chart Help link to dig into the details about the information you’re seeing.

The online help system is continuously evolving - if you find it helpful or can think of improvements to areas then let us know. We want it to be driven by you, so it gives the clearest and best information and helps you get the very best from FoCal. If you want to take a look now, the index page is here.

Software Update Channels

With the introduction of Update Channels, you can now choose to get notifications about pre-release software versions.

If you like things to be solid, leave this on Stable.

But if you’re interested in trying out new features, switch to Beta (nearly ready), or Alpha (bleeding edge!) streams.

FoCal 2.9 development has made extensive use of Alpha and Beta versions. People have been benefiting from the improvements for months and giving us invaluable feedback helping us to create this new stable version.

Lens Name Reporting

You’d think that a camera would know exactly what lens it has attached… but that’s not always the case! We’ve completely changed the way that we recognised lenses, using several internal methods to try and reliably identify the attached lens. And what’s more, if we get it wrong there’s now a way you can report it back so it’s improved in future.

The history data saved with your tests contains the raw lens information, so improvements to lens recognition will also improve the insight on your previous tests, and mean that the FoCal Comparison Data for your camera/lens will be as accurate as possible.

Speedy Analysis

FoCal has always worked in a linear fashion - instructing the camera to take a shot, waiting for the data to be available and then analysing before taking the next shot.

Overlapped Capture and Analysis significantly improves the times for tests by analysing shots while the camera takes the next ones. Tests like Aperture Sharpness and Dust Analysis are considerably quicker, and there is now very little difference in overall test time between raw and JPEG analysis.

Dark/Light Themes

macOS Mojave has introduced Dark Theme and we take note of how the OS is set up to reflect this in FoCal.

We also added a lighter theme to Windows, which you can select from the Advanced preferences tab.

Review Result and Crop Images

In previous versions of FoCal, when you reviewed a previous test from the history database you could see the results but not the crop images as these were never saved.

In FoCal 2.9, all your crop images are saved locally to your computer so you can review the complete set of results and save full reports of old tests:

Note that FoCal does NOT upload any of these images, they are only ever stored locally on your computer.

Viewing Release Notes

You can view these release notes at any time by clicking the Release Notes link by the software version number in the about window of the application.

Previous Release Notes

This is the first Stable release of FoCal 2.9, but if you want to see back through the notes related to pre-release software you can start here: https://blog.reikanfocal.com/2019/05/focal-2-9-beta-3/

Changelog

This is a non-exhaustive list of items fixed/changed since FoCal 2.6.x.

Click here to show the changelog