Originally posted by carpents I hear you there. A used 21 Limited plus 35/2.4 shouldn't set you back more than the value of your 16-50, so that might be a better option.
Of course, it's not like your shots of the kids opening presents is going to win you a Pulitzer, so maybe the concept of a 'keeper' for those can be a little more lax? I can't imagine a K10 with a DA21 is going to net you significantly more/better shots than good manual focus technique - which takes practice.
That being said, my go-to kit is a Fuji mirrorless. The little - and cheap! - X-A1 is terrific, and I adapt both my Pentax and Nikon lenses to it. But the native Fuji lenses are really, really good too. It's harder to manual focus with the Fujis though, since they only have EVFs. The trade-off is a significantly smaller kit which can fit in a jacket pocket. Pentax doesn't (yet) have this in APS-C.
You would be surprised at how bad my family snapshots can be, even with good glass.
I'm not trying to please myself, but rather my wife, who is unfortunately a harsh critic of kid pics. I've been trying to practice manual focus, but the lighting can sometimes be bad enough that I either have to crank my ISO way up, or I can't budge from f2.8, which just makes it that much harder. Posed shots are usually ok, but I like to catch them doing things a little kid does, which implies seemingly randomized motion. Semi-reliable autofocus would at least take that off my hands. Plus there's the whole 5-pound brick that I get to tote around (exaggeration, but it seems like it sometimes).
I've been staring longingly at the Fuji X cameras for a little while, and I'd love to take that plunge. It would require me to get decent money in exchange for some (or all? yikes) of my Pentax gear first, though. The budget is effectively zero for photography equipment at present. I'm sure I'd have to either step way back in lens quality (though the Fuji kit lenses get a good rap) or down to probably just one lens for the time being. Problem is that I have competing needs of fastish wide for inside and because I just happen to like it and longer for my son's soccer games. Hard to get a fast 24mm and 150-200mm in one lens.
---------- Post added 02-10-15 at 09:58 AM ----------
Originally posted by GeneV I am keeping my K10d forever and is permanently in debug mode in case this happens. I do not have pktether installed on any computer and I don't recall needing it to put the body in debug.
Personally, I find the DA*lenses better than most AF lenses for manual focus, but I would much rather have working AF. The only lens I own which has had any significant focus failure is the DA 17-70. Now that lens is tough to manual focus and has no screw drive slot.
I figured out the issue with the process, and I think you're right about being able to activate debug without PKTether. The camera's firmware is very particular about the stream of characters it reads, and it seems like that (for mine, at least) if there isn't a DOS carriage-return/line-feed pair at the end of the line, it ignores the MODSET.XXX file. Once I figured that out and converted the (Mac OS X-created) file to DOS, it worked like a charm.
I'm now happily screw-driving to my heart's content. Now I get to be reminded of just how mediocre the K10D's low-light autofocus really is.