It’ll let the camera record the two halves of every pixel looking at the two halves of the aperture, which (in Canon’s DPP software) enables you to shift bokeh, eliminate flare to some degree, and even adjust the focus depth.
Not directly available in their software, but I highly suspect you’d be able to create stereo images too using the bokeh shifting.
I imagine that flare elimination wouldn’t be so hard in in-focus regions, and the bokeh shifting isn’t too bad, but the refocusing might be harder to implement.
I’m excited as well (not only by this feature). If the claim of much improved DR/reduced read noise holds, it would make a perfect Christmas present for me. Unfortunately I will have to give this present myself, I am too old to rely on relatives wrt to Christmas presents ;-). The good thing is, that the new model arrives that late that there was a lot of time to save money for it :-).
I checked the information available on that feature. In https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcQ9MSRRvn4, around 0:44, you can see what controls are given by the original software. But I guess there’s more what could be done with the data, as you are writing. Another example, the plane of sharpness could not only be shifted along one axis but tilted slightly, which would e.g. be useful for portraits with both eyes in different distance to the camera.
As soon as the camera shows up in the local store, I’ll try to gather some raw samples.
Magic Lantern has dual ISO which alternates sensitivity, not dual pixel which is a physical sensor feature that enables phase detect autofocus on the entire sensor area, every single pixel.
It is very exciting. I have to wonder what other surprises Canon has for us with DPAF. What are the implications of this? Does this mean that one can effectively calculate the distance of every pixel from the sensor and apply sharpening based on depth? I assume this would be very natural, or at least lens-like.
Some questions that occur to me:
Will this require a different type of demosaicing and raw processing?
Will libre tools be able to adjust focus, or will that be a DPP exclusive?
Why wasn’t this announced for the 1 DX II and 80D? Both use DPAF and are quite recent. And will they get this with a firmware upgrade or will Canon prevent that just to create demand for the 5D 4.
Questions, questions, questions. But purely out of curiosity, cannot afford these cameras.
There are raw samples available for download in the gallery at
if you want to play a bit. What I tried so far: Darktable doesn’t open them, Krita crashes, RawTherapee kind of opens them, but in a weird way. However, this makes me confident that it is not too difficult to add raw support to the FLOSS tools.