After that you can try it hand-held if you like, although you will lose accuracy. So I recommend testing your first 9,000 lenses on a tripod. It usually takes about 6 months of testing 75 lenses a day before they can, though. Some of my most experienced techs can test hand held. A Few Things Before We Start You will need a tripod. Testing is a lot faster than trying out 4 copies before you decide a lens just isn’t for you. But that’s not always convenient or possible. You can just take pictures and if you don’t like the lens send it back. Nobody needs to do optical testing, of course. It can be helpful to know if the problem is with the optics of that copy, rather than the focus system, technique, or simply that the lens isn’t designed to perform any better than that. For that you do need Imatest, a bench, or just a lot of photographs.īut if you have a lens that isn’t performing like you think it should this will let you determine if the lens is optically aligned and centered properly. It’s doesn’t let you compare two different lens models and decide which is sharper. This is not going to let you test 6 copies of a lens and determine which is the absolute sharpest copy on your camera. The target looks like this image below.But let me be clear about this is not, so I don’t waste your time if you wanted something else. I place these files into the public domain and make no claims for their accuracy or ability to allow a camera to focus on them.

The links are:įor the Illustrator 'source' file (1.1Mb) The target should print onto an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

I've made available a similar target in Adobe Illustrator (CS6) and in PDF format.

I believe those charts are expensive and/or copyrighted. In the video clip, the author refers to a 'Siemens Star' chart.

With all the concern about D800 focusing, I thought I would contribute to the 'war effort' by making a focus target similar to the one referred in the blog posting at It is much easier to tell if the text is blur or sharp than some random patterns.

Siemens focus chart