This is the latest from Get Olympus Facebook QA.

Will Olympus ever have a manual focus "peaking" feature?

hadn't heard that term before, am guessing you've seen this function on other cameras. We use a similar effect for the histogram to illustrate out of gamut values. I'll pass along your suggestion, like it.

Huh, never though of using the histogram to determine if your in/out of focus.  I guess what Oly is saying this is effectively what Sony is displaying in relation to the Live View.  Sounds awesome, will have to test it out tonight when I get home from work.  I could be misinterpreting Oly's response...

The histogram is a mysterious thing. I still don't know how to read one.

i too can not fathom it

You can not determine the precise focusing from the histogram!
The answer you got is nonsense, you should probably describe the feature (i.e. highlighting the sharply focused areas, not depending on exposure) and demand another answer.

I do hope that they implement it soon, or I will not buy their cameras!

Quote from: M5-User on August 11, 2011, 06:06:40 PM

Here is a simple guide to exposure using the Histogram
Shoot to the right... but NOT all the way to the right... leave a little space

Danger is my middle name, I take it all the way to the right! Well, t depends...If the peak is too high itll clip if you push it, but if the peak is at or maybe a bit lower than the sample posted here, Ill push it corner to corner or as far to the right as I can. Sometimes the camera warns me about overexposure, but then I get home and all the highlight info is there and can easily be brought down. Bringing down highlights has no fouls (no noise or artifacts) but brightening up to compensate will in most cases make noise or artifacts appear. This method gives me dynamic range way over what these cameras are capable of.

The danger with this method is if you have small white birds in the scene. They are too small to register in the histogram and will be totally blown out. Been there, done that. So while it's a good strategy, you should use it with caution.

The answer you got is nonsense, you should probably describe the feature (i.e. highlighting the sharply focused areas, not depending on exposure) and demand another answer.

I wasn't around during the QA to get clarification on the question.  The question was from another, I just read it afterwards in the thread. 

I think the Oly guy did know what feature the guy was talking about.   Typically, in the tech business engineers play dumb like they never heard of a competitor's feature.  This way the customer can't complain that they chose not to have parity with their competitors, and the customer feels happy like they are contributing to future design by pointing out a competitor has a feature they like. 

Oly probably didn't think of this "peaking" solution while the E-P3 was being developed, and they didn't want to throw it in at the last second without proper testing.  Plus, it might violate a patent Sony filed if they did add it. 

Someone else asked (again) about a rangefinder/hybrid view finder, and they got the typical "I like that idea" response.  Your best bet during the QA sessions is to point out what technical limitation the camera has, and ask what can Oly do to address those issues.  If you ask for a feature directly you will get the "i like that idea" response. 

My question for next week if I can make it in time would be "I'm losing a lot of peak action moments when shooting sports due to Live View lag because the subject is moving too fast and I can't see them to keep them in the frame.  How can I overcome live view buffer lag when shooting sequential mode?".  The answer is you can't, unless you're really good at praying.  But, they might reveal some ideas they are working on for a future EVF (hybrid?) or next gen "pro" model.

I place the spot meter on my subject and adjust for it. It's what's important.

Man, you guys get so much more into taking photos than I do. I never even look at my histogram, I just put it on Aperture Priority mode.

try it out! What's the worse that could happen?

I think the Oly response was quite clear. Let me rephrase it:
"We haven't heard of focus peaking before, but it sounds kinda like something else we do for something else." They are not saying anywhere the something else will be related or used for the focus.

As for histograms and exposure, once again I find myself the opposite of lisandra If in doubt, underexpose. It is infinitely easier to recover shadows than find forever lost highlights. Also remember unless you're looking at the RGB histogram, you can clip a colour even if the luminance histo looks ok. This can often happen shooting strongly coloured objects like flowers.

Man, you guys get so much more into taking photos than I do. I never even look at my histogram, I just put it on Aperture Priority mode.

Me too 

I use aperture mode and increase the exposure 0.3 then use the histogram to control the highlights. I do this to increase the noise to signal ratio (only useful if you take your pictures raw). There's a good article about that here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/optimizing_exposure.shtml

"We haven't heard of focus peaking before, but it sounds kinda like something else we do for something else."

They havent heard??? peak focusing is not new, its been a video feature for years!