My Rough Autofocus Test

All lenses can inherently be affected by front or back focus problems. Out of the blue, I was a bit curious whether my lenses have such problems and I don’t have a test chart handy, so I did a very rough autofocus test of my own. Proper test charts can be found on the net.

The lenses I tested were Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 and Nikon 50mm f/1.4.

The settings used were ISO200, f/2.8, 50mm, ~1/80s. I also had the D700 on the Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod to minimise camera shake.

I had the camera at about 45 degree from the test card and then autofocused on the right edge of the grey bar (the red box shows where my focus was - a feature from ViewNX).

To inspect the focus, I zoomed to 100% of the image and checked the focus and Depth of Field (DOF). Below are 100% crop of the test shots.

100% crop - Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 50mm, f/2.8

100% crop - Nikon 50mm f/1.4 @ 50mm, f/2.8

From what I can see, the focus of both test shots were pretty much where I focused (indicated by the red box), sharing about the same DOF to the front and back of the focus plane.

While I probably will do the test again with a proper test chart, for the time being, I will leave the camera without any AF tuning.