On Sep 13, 2011, at 2:30 PM, Dario Bonazza wrote: > Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > > It's very interesting to hear others' take on this. I have found over > and over again that when I disable AF my photos are far more > consistently in-focus, regardless of camera and regardless of how low > the light I'm working in might be or whether the subjects are moving > or not. AF generally does little other than slow things down for me. > Like steve, I've moved more and more to abandoning AF entirely too. > > I'm open to better manual focus with better focus aids, and I could do that > at times. But for quick action you simply don't have the time for focusing. > > "As quick and precise an AF system as possible" would lead me to > looking into the Nikon D3s and D700, they seem to be the market > leaders in this area as well as in sensitivity and noise control. > > I perceive the K-5 and a few good lenses as the poor man's D3s/D700 & AF > Nikkor VR lenses outfit, which I could hardly afford. Not to speak of the > special relationship I have developed with the Pentax people in Italy/Europe.
I'm pretty good at manual focus, but there are times when I can't see well enough to focus, even with a katzeye, and the autofocus will work. I've seen reports, which I believe, that autofocus consistently outperforms manual focus. The problem being that it focuses perfectly on the wrong thing. I've found that live view, especially with zoom, allows me to focus in light that is beyond the ability for either unassisted, or autofocus. Unfortunately, the K-5 takes about a fortnight to actually take the shot after pressing the shutter, when in liveview. My suspicion is that somebody did some embedded systems programming when all they know is writing Java for desktop computers. When the scene is fairly static, I pop it into LV, manually focus, then pop it out of live view. Unfortunately, if I've taken any photos, pressing the LV button will freeze the camera up until everything has been written from buffer into memory (see note above about embedded systems programming). The K-5 is an amazing camera, and in many ways the one that I've been waiting to be affordable for years, or decades, but there are so many things about the software that are simply braindead. Almost every complaint I have about it is with the software. Give me access to the source code and a couple of months and I could give you a camera that is damned near perfect. Maybe you could talk to your special friends at Pentax and we could get those issues fixed. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
