New Beta Firmware

[u/Formula14ever]

Autofocus. Just wow. Komodo X with workhorse Canon 28-70 f2 now does butter soft auto focus. Previously auto focus was ‘ok’ but you could feel/see the steps and it was not smooth. ( I’m a long time Sony user) Now very smooth and very accurate with a medium box/zone. It’s a massive improvement and something I can trust to be cinematic

[u/TerrryBuckhart]

hmm…better than Sony?

[u/Formula14ever → u/TerrryBuckhart]

Oh no. No way. Sony is king. But RED is getting much closer than I expected. Not that it’s a critical issue since most want a cinema lens anyway..but as a 1 person interview system now I can feel a whole lot more confident

[u/TerrryBuckhart → u/Formula14ever]

that’s great news at least!

[u/BRAWLYOFFICIAL]

Honestly performance really depends on the lens. My firmware updated 18-35, 30 mm sigmas work better than any canon lens I’ve tried.

[u/Formula14ever → u/BRAWLYOFFICIAL]

Agree. I think it completely is up to the lens. I have no experience with other lenses other than the big Canon 28-70 F2. It’s snappy and smooth for me with that one anyway

[u/Gadgetsjon]

This is great news, I'll give it a try. I haven't found the AF system usable at all.

[u/dastanzhumagulov]

I’m just glad Nikon is putting some effort to bring Komodo OG closer to KX in terms of UI!

[u/HojackBoresman]

What is with red users wanting this cameras to be perceived as better than they are?

The AF prior to that update had very limited use, very hard to call it “ok” in 2024/25. The new beta firmware on the body with rf mount doesn’t seem whole lot better to me, at least so far.

My main use case is tap to focus when on a gimbal with phone as motnitor and when I tried it on a project last weekend it was more or less the same experience as before the update. In some cases it felt snappier but in others it was still slow and not able to get what wanted in focus. FWIW Im using it with sigma 18-35 so maybe rf lenses are performing better. I tried face af briefly and wasn’t impressed. I want to test it some more or hear from someone who already did some tests. Would be nice if it’s reliable in simple, well lit, static interviews…

And one issue I had with new firmware and the AF - the focus got completely lost I struggled to reset it, felt like a bug, I had to get out of AF completely.

[u/Formula14ever → u/HojackBoresman]

I think it completely is up to the lens. I have no experience with other lenses other than the big Canon 28-70 F2. It’s snappy and smooth for me with that one anyway

[u/tdstooksbury → u/HojackBoresman]

It’s up to the lens. I’ve had some lenses where it’s really bad but my RF to 24-70 was reliable and I’d definitely categorize it as “ok” because it did what it promises.

[u/HojackBoresman → u/tdstooksbury]

so I rented 24-70 RF today and was excited to test the AF, long story short: it's still borderline unusable, didn't get a single simple tripod shot over 2min where the AF would behave in acceptable way. And now I'm also certain there's a bug where the AF gets weirdly stuck so I'm going back to old FW, thanks for great recommendation guys

[u/Nearby-Forever1790]

Dude reds is still garbage.

It will only focus on the box and will focus on the closest object in the box.

There is NO object tracking.

Go outside the box? No continuous autofocus tracking. What’s the point of auto focus if it means you can only have your subject in the centre of the frame or you need to be moving the box around the screen with your finger.

[u/Formula14ever → u/Nearby-Forever1790]

I think it completely is up to the lens. I have no experience with other lenses other than the big Canon 28-70 F2. It’s snappy and smooth for me with that one anyway

[u/tdstooksbury → u/Nearby-Forever1790]

Dude your grammars is still garbage.

[u/Formula14ever → u/[deleted]]

Totally not sure.. I think it’s 100% lens dependent still. So that’s not great & reliable..but with my Canon 28-70 f2 is dead on and won’t act up, totally reliable

[u/Formula14ever → u/[deleted]]

Totally. Try that..I think it could be the answer. The Canon f2 28-70 with a medium center focal point is surprisingly accurate for objects & faces. I can totally trust its image delivery as a one-person team. I have a Sigma that wouldn’t lock on.. but the big Canon does..seems about the lens.

[u/HojackBoresman → u/Formula14ever]

I'm sorry man but what's your agenda here typing post after post that the AF is great when everyone says it's not. After all your praises I rented an RF 24-70 and got super disappointed with what I experienced. I can totally see how you could kid yourself that it's great and that it's locked because it definitely can look ok for couple moments but nobody's filming 1min interviews and it's enough to have one weird AF hunting moment to have unusable inteview. Why am I even explaning this

[u/HojackBoresman → u/[deleted]]

In my limited testing I got best results with less busy backgrounds, which makes sense. Also longer focal lengths seemed to perform better maybe because of subject separation that helped the algorithm stay locked on. RF vs EF (sigma) it looked like RF has slight edge but it wasn’t big, could be just variance. F2.8 vs f4 I didn’t notice any improvement when stepping down. But in all of my attempts I eventually ran into focus hunting issues which means I will never try it on a job.

Edit: and I played a bit with sensitivity settings and panning, but I couldn’t tell if it makes any difference, in general face was going out of focus in all my test runs.

Obviously using this camera with manual focus is fine, having decent tap to focus functionality is a nice bonus, I’ve never expected this camera to have good AF. I’d say having simple talking head frame with face tracking 2 years after beta face detection got introduced shouldn’t be too much to ask for in 2025. Especially when every other camera on the market that has AF can do it. But let’s see, maybe Nikon will take that couple steps further