A few software-only features to improve DSLRs 
Friday, January 12, 2007, 11:14 AM - Photography
From time to time, I am wondering "why is this feature not available in my camera?".

To me, there are some features that might be quite handy in some situations, and strangely they are not always available. The surprising thing is that many of them are pure software features, which means that they would increase development/validation/user documentation/support costs a little, but would not increase production cost at all. As some manufacturers implemented some of them, in most cases it's clearly not an implementation issue, but probably just a choice from the manufacturer.

Here is a list of some of those features:

*Focus confirmation and sensor stabilization on manual lenses:
If the body already provides sensor stabilization, it can also be used with manual lenses. As with focus confirmation, the only piece of information required is the focal length. So why not letting users enter it manually?

*Focus length information for AF zoom lenses:
Obviously this is known by the camera, as it's part of exif information. Why not displaying it into the viewfinder when user is changing focal length?

*Depth of field information:
Could be computed easily inside camera.

*Trap focus:
You manually set the focus, and when camera detects something in focus at the specified focus location/distance, it fires. This would ease macrophotography a lot.

*Ability to set the auto-ISO interval:
My camera is only automatically adjusting ISO sensitivity between 100 and 400. While it's nice in full light, when the light is dimmer it becomes quite annoying to have to manually switch between ISO settings. I'd like to be able to change it to 200-800 for some indoor or even to 800-3200 for handheld night photography.

*Ability to have a preview shot with histogram:
Take a shot that will not be written to flash card, in order to have an idea about the light rendering and the histogram values. For newcomers, it would be very nice, especially for night scenes.

*In camera on-demand raw to jpeg conversion:
Ability to convert raw to jpeg in camera, allowing to choose potential exposure compensation.

*Timer based interval shooting:
Nice for thunder shooting.

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