I have decided that the only way for me to enjoy this beautiful simulator is to find a way to fly in ‘showcase’ mode. Asobo is probably never going to change the ‘exterior’ zoom nonesense since they have invested so much into the drone idea.
I have set up my HOTAS desk so that I can ‘trigger’ my joystick (index finger),to work the ‘C’ toggle. (drone/plane controls). Left hand trottle has three buttons that I click with my ring, middle, and index fingers, to toggle ‘cockpit’, ‘exterior’ and ‘showcase’ respectively.
Works like a charm!
Before I start to roll down the runway, I adjust the drone controls to follow and to chase. I also adjust the zoom from default 50% up to 75%. You might also want to slow down the rotation speed to 30%.
Then, back to showcase view I can TRANSLATE the plane away from me (also with my joystick buttons). All HOTAS control of the camera, and it works like magic. Beautiful. No lense distortion. I can translate the plane as far away or as near as I want without zoom pain. This sim is absolutely beautiful.
The catch is…it takes a bit of practice till it becomes second nature. I can switch from cockpit to showcase to view to plane control without lifting my hands off of the HOTAS. Love it!
@ RICKOTOPIA Yup, this is what I happily discovered only a few days ago, and was going to post. I am really talking about just “spotting” atm, and have a menu item as an “aircraft” which I call “spotty” which is essentially an invisible aircraft with no panel, so I can forward view “out of the window” and the sim does not have to draw an aircraft when in showcase view, which saves sim resources. (ORBX have a similar freeware “spotter” called Bob)
Once in showcase mode, (similar to the “spot” view in P3D). The cameras field of view can be narrowed, (zoom in) so stretches are not visible any more, then I simply move away (translate, not zoom) from the “invisible aircraft” and everything stays in perspective (no stretches!) Allelujah!
Thank heavens that external sound is not affected either.
I will post a couple of before and after pics over the next day or two to show this in action
The only thing left to do (have raised a ticket with Asobo) is get the drone speed to be persistent, like most other speed settings with the cameras. Currently I have to keep resetting the drone speed to my preferred speed, as it keeps defaulting back to 4% which is far too slow, on sim restart.
Pic 1 is EXTERNAL view at 50% Zoom and Pic 2 is SHOWCASE at 56% Zoom
Which pic looks more natural?
I use Cockpit/Showcase view all the time now. The pics above show you can get a WIDE shot without using the dreaded zoom, and get a stretch free picture 
Now, from your second picture, adjust the zoom to 75%, and then TRANSLATE away from the plane to your liking. Then rotate your image. ( make sure you have Track IR ‘off’. Drone follow ‘on’ and Drone lock ‘on’).
@CasualClick nice post , but i’m not playing photographer camera simulator ,
we only want to have a ‘normal’ view on 3 screens or more.
FSX could do it so what’s the problem ??
I believe the problem is still that Asobo aren’t flight simmers from the get go, nor are they simmers in any way ! So all those cameras requirements IN USAGES is not familiar for them and they have “ideas of their own” (they did make good games besides this simulator !) on the product that they mostly don’t use…
The wide screen effect on “zooming” which is NOT A ZOOM but a change of camera angle is like the network setup : bad, not made by people using it, not thought through, UI-wise badly implemented (the constant reset of camera settings during a flight, the default pit view, the wide angle etc), and not suited for the sim, not even using what existed before btw…
Meanwhile, many people know (out of Asobo) how to operate a flight sim camera, BUT the SDK is closed and very likely to stay that way so that noone except Asobo has a (bad) hold (I’d say grip !) on cameras in MSFS. It is like they know they did wrong (complaints from users on those camera tools in MSFS started in oct 2019 !), but they are suddenly blind about it and they keep saying “our camera system is great” while people are shouting at it every day…
I have nothing against their ideas and often they are good.
But I dont understand why they not make it an option to change the camera. It is basically a field of view and the ability to move the camera back/forwars that controls the view frustum. Basically nothing but one matrix that we need to be able to edit externally.
It would not cost them much to offer this, of course people could clip through walls but I must say the fisheye perspective does not just slightly annoy me, but after I played other games for a while and return to MSFS it is downright irritating to look into this distortion mirror again. It might be the first sim that I ditch because of camera geometry (the second issue is the blur). It sounds ridiculous but looking for hours on hours on a distorted, blurry image is like wearing someone elses glasses, simply not feasible. I simply dont understand this as the issue was totally obvious and noticeable even before the released the games, just by looking at screenshots and recognizing the banana shape of airplanes.
Images of long planes like the CRJ are particularly amusing, when I showed this to non-gamer people some collegue remarked “this looks nice but why is the plane not straight?”
This…
Also, every scenery I look at I’m also wondering how “realistic” is my camera in the sim compared to an eye irl, because it is very odd to have that immediate distortion “as a zooming tool”…
I wonder if Asobo is really proud of the camera system/ engine whatever it’s called, or if they just are happy in comparison of what we had in FSX/ P3D (where we had still the option to get the best tool available out of the sim eventually)… Here, no one can access a camera SDK (there is none)…
I mean even Dovetail in their Flight Sim World did not make that mistake. Why professionals like Asobo can miss that, I cannot understand.
Maybe they are not actually professional. There is a word for that, which will come to me in a moment…
Not sure if im right, but to me it looks like you can change anything you want and does not do a thing because this section i doin in postprocessing which is in your setting is set to off = 0, 1st line after {PostProcess
Enabled 0 ( turn this to 1= on)
Then the other setting work, otherwise not. But first enable the post process by enabling it
It is really depressing to see nothing at all has happened with regard to the distored images.
The sad truth is that the average person does not notice this, and raves about the graphics.
Lately I noticed that MSFS makes me nauseaus because of the perspective and I spent an unhealthy amount to try and alleviate this problem, something that probably takes a few lines of code.
Really dissapointed by the developers in this regard. I think I will fly X-Plane much more in 2022, I am getting tired of looking through a fishbowl.
Asobo please fix this!
This fish-eye perspective is horrible, we want FSX cameras!
Two years, waiting.
Please!
Agree… 
This has been asked for since day one. If it ain’t happened by now it ain’t going to happen.
It doesn’t stop me from flying (my busted joystick is currently doing that lol) but I would like an option to disable it as I do find it a bit annoying.
Totally agree
A lot of us really don’t like the wide angle camera effect that gives a completely distorted perspective and that is keeping us from even wanting to play the game, as pillars in the cockpit take too much space when looking around, or tails and wings take too much screen when panning around in the external view.
The world of MSFS is beautiful but the airplane’s proportions look off and it is not pleasing to the eye in the slightest, we would like to have “legacy (FSX)” cameras as a default, please!
Some clarification:
-This is not a matter of triple monitors or ultra wide screens, it is noticeable on single monitors on all aspect ratios, even 4:3! Just look at the pictures!
-It does not get fixed with playing with zoom settings, as camera distance is fixed
-Drone mode is not the solution
-It is not present on all games or cameras out there!
This wide-angle effect is an unnecessary and extremely annoying distortion aimed at showing more on the same screen space to look fancier, but it should be optional, as it has drawbacks!
FSX (This should be the default)
MSFS (This should be optional)
We should not have to play around with camera, zoom, drone, etc… settings to obtain an undistorted image! Please make the first perspective the default.
Thank you.
someone post a visual example cause I honestly can’t even imagine what this is all about. The external camera?
NO idea, really… my cockpit looks normally and the perspectives are certainly better than in FSX. I don’t use the preset views as I have TrackIR, maybe there is a difference. But I can’t even imagine the problem, fisheye normally means that it’s clear in the center and distorted towards the outside…
The fish-eye camera also makes landscape features in exterior view look farther away than they actually are. Move the camera around and you quickly realize that objects look much smaller in the center of the field of view than they do near the edges of it. I often will intentionally move the camera so as to view some distant object in the periphery of the camera view because I can see it better there.
I live in Denver, and in the sim it almost looks like Denver has no mountains nearby because they look so small and far away. The mountains don’t look at all like they do in real life. It’s exactly the same downside that comes from using any wide angle lens, such as those in most smartphones. I’d like an option to select the field of view.
Yeah same here. I have never seen a fish eye effect since the release. I know there is an option to correct camera but thats it. Maybe its people with those ultra wide monitors experience this