How do Micro Four Thirds cameras know a lens’s distortion correction settings?
Asked 6/7/2020
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On my Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera, many Zuiko lenses show noticeable barrel distortion in the RAW image, but the in-camera JPEGs look corrected. How does the camera know what correction to apply? Is it using one generic profile, analyzing the image itself, or getting lens-specific distortion data from the lens?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
2 Answers
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Micro Four Thirds (MFT) is a vendor-neutral platform that standardizes the information communicated between camera and lens. Lenses can inform the attached camera body some of their chromatic aberration (CA), lens distortion, and and vignetting characteristics. This allows for an MFT body to do in-camera lens corrections.
Aside from the obvious reasons of high-interoperability as a platform goal, this also allows lens makers to not have to solve such distortions and aberrations optically in the lens. This allows for lighter, less complex, and less expensive lenses.
References:
- Olympus and Panasonic compatibility, In-camera lens correction (apotelyt.com)
- A distorted view? In-camera distortion correction (dpreview.com article)
- Olympus Lens Distortion Correction Does Not Exist??? (dpreview.com discussion thread)
Originally by user11924. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user11924
6y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
With Micro Four Thirds, the camera typically does not guess or analyze the scene to figure out distortion. Instead, the lens communicates correction data to the camera through the standardized MFT electronic interface. That can include lens-specific information for distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting, which the camera uses when creating JPEGs and which RAW converters may also read and apply.
So the correct idea is: the camera identifies the attached lens electronically and uses that lens’s stored correction parameters, rather than applying one universal pattern to every image.
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