On Fri, Feb 24, 2006 at 08:18:24PM +0100, Jens Bladt wrote: > A 5 FPS camera from Pentax (Autumn 2006) is a little late, isn't it? > > I am speaking from experience, you know. I have shot almost 30.000 frames > with a *ist D. I believe I know very well, what I'm talking about. > > I don't really do action shots.
Well, make up your mind. If experience matters, then I think my thousands of action shots, taken with the *ist-D, suggest that perhaps *I* know what I'm talking about when I say that the D is adequate for all but the most demanding situations. Not ideal, by any means, but adequate. And some of the limitations were fixed, some time ago, in the DS; I've yet to encounter a situation where a D with the write speed and buffer size of the DS, (plus, on a few occasions, the 4fps frame rate of the PZ-1p), would have prevented me getting just the shot I was trying for. As, by your admission, you don't do action photography, then your experience isn't really relevant, no matter how many frames you have shot. As others have pointed out, it's the photographer, far more than the equipment, that determines how good a shot you can bring home. I've even managed to get first-class results from a simple Canon Powershot G1 (an 8x10, from a 3.3MP camera, of a Porsche 911 at racing speeds) - when I mix it in with my best DSLR and scanned shots nobody has yet been able to pick it out as the P&S sample. If you expect the camera to do everything for you, then of course you're going to be disappointed. It's best to pre-focus at about the right distance, so that even if you're using focus tracking the camera is starting from roughly the right setting. That's where the *ist-D and siblings are much better than the MZ-S - the AF logic predicts which way to correct far more often, so you lose less shots while the AF hunts to the end-stop and back again. It's also best to select the AF point, rather than letting the camera choose (this becomes more important at long focal lengths). This isn't rocket science. In fact if you look carefully at how most of those full-time professionals with a truckload of Canon gear work, you'll find that they use their equipment in just that way - letting their experience guide the camera's automation.
