Pentax MX-1 Review

Autofocus

In general, the MX-1's autofocus performance for stills is excellent.  During street and landscape shooting, we found that the AF system was in no way a limiting factor.  The AF motor is fast, and focus is locked in fractions of a second in good light at telephoto focus settings (i.e. if the subject is more than 5 meters away).  Close-ups take a bit longer, but the AF speed is still acceptable as long as you're not constantly switching between close-up and distant subjects.

In low light (i.e. at night), or when there is very little contrast, the AF may hunt a little.  At night, the overall AF performance was a bit sluggish, but still fast enough to the point where it isn't at all annoying.  While the normal AF was fast enough to capture moving subjects, the MX-1 tracking mode is practically useless, and continuous autofocus is far too slow for any sort of action.

AF Modes

AF-S: focus is locked at the time of image capture.  Choose one of the 25 AF areas manually, always use the center AF point, or let the camera decide (auto).  In auto mode, the camera also supports face detection.  Compared to earlier point and shoots, the MX-1 does a bit better job of locking on to faces.

Tracking: the camera attempts to keep the focus locked on the same area, even if you move the camera.  This mode doesn't do what you'd expect it to (third option in the right sub-menu above).

AF-C: the camera continuously adjusts the focus to keep the subject in focus.  Only works with auto AF area selection.  This is essentially the same thing as video AF, and it is very slow to make adjustments.

Other Focus Modes

Macro: the camera can focus closer than normally at both the wide and tele zoom settings (AF).

1cm Macro: the camera can focus on subjects as close as 1cm away at the wide zoom setting (AF).

Pan Focus: thanks to depth of field, most subjects will be in focus via a single predefined setting (no AF).

Infinity: the focus setting is fixed for shooting distant objects (no AF).  Flash is disabled.

Manual Focus: The MX-1 offers a sluggish and fairly inconvenient manual focus option.  When selected, the up and down buttons on the 4-way pad can be used to adjust the focus.  The option must be accessed whenever you want to change the focus setting, since the 4-way pad also offers other functionality while shooting.