Focus via distance settings?

[inkista]

Originally Posted by sk66

The loss of the aperture ring and related scales is sad, but I didn't know how to use them until they started disappearing from lenses (oh, 20 yrs) so I understand why they are being omitted.

Two main reasons that I can see as to why distance scales and DoF scales are no longer the default: 1) the focus "throw" or "travel" (i.e., how far the ring turns from near limit to infinity) is drastically shorter on autofocus lenses vs. manual focus lenses to help the camera autofocus more quickly. This makes the distance scale far more compressed, and much less exact/useful on most autofocus lenses. And 2) the DoF scale varies with the focal length (and sensor format), so putting one on a zoom lens would probably require an LCD display, which would be prohibitively expensive and probably require a mount reworking.