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Image Stabilisation


Heccie Thump

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I want to check with you guys on how image stabilisation is meant to work on the XT4 and whether I might have an issue.

I was out with the camera yesterday with the 80mm macro lens, which has OIS, and the 1.4 Teleconverter and did some tests to see how good the stabilisation was performing by pointing at random objects/general landscape.  On the lens I had the OIS switch turned on and I selected the stabilisation to be always on in the menu option and was suitably impressed with how much camera shake was reduced.  However, when I went in the menu and selected Shooting Only for stabilisation I noticed something odd.  My understanding with this mode is that when you half press the shutter release the OIS is meant to turn on and stabilise the image just before completing the shot.  With the focus switch set to Continuous AF this is exactly what happened - shaky image, half press, stable image.  But, if the focus selector switch is set to Single AF I half press the release and I get no stabilisation.  The focus locks and the exposure locks but the image is still shaky in the viewfinder.

I swapped out the lens for my 16-80mm kit lens and this performs exactly the same - no image stabilisation with Single AF selected, so it appears to be something to do with the body and not the lens.

Is this normal?  I would be surprised if stabilisation only kick in when you fully press the shutter release because some shots are taken with tiny fractions of a second of exposure and the mechanism will still need a finite time to engage.

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I couldn't find my manual so downloaded a PDF copy and did some searching.  From p146 of the manual, regarding Shooting Only stabilisation:

"Image stabilization enabled only when the shutter button is pressed halfway (focus mode C) or the shutter is released."

So it appears that the camera is 'working as intended' and that in AF-S the stabilisation mechanism kicks in only as you release the shutter.

I think I would prefer it to activate on a half press, like it does in AF-C.

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Interesting, and a bit subtle. I also think it'd be better to activate on a half press. But there seems to be good reasoning behind a number of other choices, so I wonder if there's a good reason behind this one and we're just not seeing it. To some degree IS goes on and off like AF does, but this is an exception, isn't it?

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