On 4/26/2012 03:21, Larry Colen wrote:
All weekend long I felt like I was fighting with my K-5, rather than just using it. I suspect that a lot of my problems were with my inexpensive split prism focusing screen. At least the metering problems. When I put the 18-250 on the metering flat out didn't work. Even with faster glass, most of the metering indoors was 0.7-2.0 stops under, and not consistently either. Unfortunately, the lighting indoors tended to be rather uneven and I blew a lot of photos by not keeping a better eye on exposure.
In general I find that K-7 works more consistently than K-5 in terms of focusing and metering reliability. But I have only one K-7 and only two K-5's so that it is not representative of anything.
Larry, that focusing screen that I have in my manual focusing K-5 (ee-S from Canon) has the additional property of being completely uniformly blank. Thus it does not have any effect on metering. It has been reported by PentaxForums (I cannot confirm or disprove this 'cause I have no such lenses) that it works linearly with K and M mount lenses with stop down metering. It /seems/ somewhat brighter with bright glass than the stock screen and hence it may cause ever so slight underexposure which is a good thing in my book because my other K-5 is simply set to -0.7 Ev as a standard fix for its metering inaccuracy.
Focusing tended to be a problem too. I ended up throwing away a lot of what would have been great photos because of poor focus. Poor autofocus is something I probably can't (accurately) blame on the focusing screen. There's no easy way, however, to see which blown focus shots were done with auto focus and which with manual focus.
I tend to think (it is a matter of inductive conclusion that I cannot support with rigorous testing, 'cause "I shoot I don't test" t-shirt that I have) the center AF point is indeed the most precise one. So may be for AF you could use center point and then refocus. Given that this would cause some focusing mistakes, you might want to take slightly wider lens so as to allow you shorter refocusing movement and so as to plan for some cropping afterwards.
HTH. Boris -- 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.
