[secateurs]

This is great! Thanks! Reputation awarded!

[Adam]

Any idea why the EXIF isn't there in the seagull shot? Great show overall! I've also corrected your thread title so that it reads 'K-5'.

[pefoto01]

Сега вече,аз мисля че аф-к е по-добър!
Мерси за теста!
поздрав!

[garyk]

All this talk is great. But I was out at a site again today with guys shooting with canon and nikon. af-c. bif.

It's not that i am not believing anyone here. But I have a hard time believing they have made this kind of improvement in af-c.
I get ok results but canon and nikon just bang away at 5-10 fps without limit and hesitation.
Does anyone have a comparison between k-x, k-7, and k-5?

I shoot alot of bif lately. I do not have difficulty locking on at all. But after that the hesitation is very bad. And with no buffer to speak of it is very difficult. And the k-5 has the same buffer as the k-7 ?????
It would take a quantum leap to even get close to the big two. I hope i am WRONG!

I see that as being a very poor action shooter?
I hope i am wrong.

---

Last edited by garyk; 10-24-2010 at 05:55 AM.

[JohnBee]

All this talk is great. But I was out at a site again today with guys shooting with canon and nikon. af-c. bif.

It's not that i am not believing anyone here. But I have a hard time believing they have made this kind of improvement in af-c.
I get ok results but canon and nikon just bang away at 5-10 fps without limit and hesitation.
Does anyone have a comparison between k-x, k-7, and k-5?

This is about what I get(keepers) with my D700.
The higher-end AF doesn't happen in this price bracket I'm afraid.

[telfish]

Any idea why the EXIF isn't there in the seagull shot? Great show overall! I've also corrected your thread title so that it reads 'K-5'.

I am guessing it's because these are crops of a small area of a much bigger frame. The birds in the whole scene are pretty tiny. So it's hard to see if they are in focus. That makes the ability of the K5 to lock on 90% of the time pretty good as far as I can see.

I did 10 sequences with the gulls and 3 with the girls. All the girls shots were in focus no duds. This was the worse sequence with the gulls. At least 90% of all the shots were in focus.

Shooting birds against a plainish sky may not be the best test. I would thing against a busy background things would not be so good hit wise.


I can post more examples form either set if people really need that. I can just resize a seagull set and post the whole thing with exif intact.

Let me know

[rawr]

I get ok results but canon and nikon just bang away at 5-10 fps without limit and hesitation.

They may bang away without hesitation but that doesn't mean all their shots are in focus and keepers.

If you look at the Canon/Nikon AF torture test guy's site
Autofocus Torture Test Updated (Canon 1D MKIV & Nikon D3S added) | Pro Photo Home
you'll see some in-focus percentage results for the various bodies, high end included.

The best you he got was about 90% of shots in focus with the Canon 1D IV, followed by the Nikon D3s at about 80%, the 7D at about 70% etc. Even the best systems aren't anywhere near perfect. And if you want high performance with AF.C, it comes with a price tag.

The buffer isssues has been discussed extensively elsewhere, including a good detailed discussion on dpreview. Bottom line is it's hard to improve buffer performance unless you can write to the card faster (SDHC has limits vs CF cards) or make the file sizes smaller (eg shoot JPG instead of RAW, or write 12bit vs 14 bit RAW etc).

[telfish]

All this talk is great. But I was out at a site again today with guys shooting with canon and nikon. af-c. bif.

It's not that i am not believing anyone here. But I have a hard time believing they have made this kind of improvement in af-c.
I get ok results but canon and nikon just bang away at 5-10 fps without limit and hesitation.
Does anyone have a comparison between k-x, k-7, and k-5?

I shoot alot of bif lately. I do not have difficulty locking on at all. But after that the hesitation is very bad. And with no buffer to speak of it is very difficult. And the k-5 has the same buffer as the k-7 ?????
It would take a quantum leap to even get close to the big two. I hope i am WRONG!

I see that as being a very poor action shooter?
I hope i am wrong.

Yep, hard to believe your lying eyes I guess! I took 400+shots mainly of the birds. I can post several more sequences showing every shot in the sequence in focus, in fact I will post a set later un cropped with the exif intact so you can see the shooting intervals between shots, will that help?


You can view the full size sequences of the girls running here. http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/13738865/1/Girls%20running?h=091286


And the full size of two sequences of the gulls here Dropbox - Photos - Online backup, file sync and sharing made easy.

The only OOF ones with the girls was when they came closer than the minimum focus distance of the lens.

If you shoot jpeg the K5 buffer is fine. you get 20-30 shots 14 megs full quality depending on subject matter. Do you really want more than that? RAW is a different matter but you get 5-8 shots normally and I think for Bif's that's probably enough. Would I like it bigger and better, hell yes but then we all want that at no cost.

I would like Pentax to produce an all singing all dancing APS camera even if it costs $2000+ Not sure I am in the majority though looking at all the whining about the K5 cost.

[garyk]

Yea, AF-c is not why i am buying the k-5. That is a small part of the package. Would be nice to have at one point though. Without buying new glass.

[telfish]

This is about what I get(keepers) with my D700.
The higher-end AF doesn't happen in this price bracket I'm afraid.

To be honest I am not all that concerned with what other cameras do or don't do. However If you want to get an idea look at the keeper rate in the torture test linked to earlier in the thread. Some of those numbers are pretty dismal.

In The runner running towards the camera (girls) test the K5 scored 100% in focus over 4 runs. Now I know it's not a controlled experiment like the torture tests, and maybe they have the runner running from further away. The girls ran from about 50 yards away. I was using the 70-200 at various focal lengths but mainly towards the long end so the perspective is somewhat compressed.

In the torture tests they used a tripod. not sure how you do normal action shots on a tripod! Usually you are hand held as I was in these or if you are fixed in a seat somewhere maybe a monopod.

[telfish]

Yea, AF-c is not why i am buying the k-5. That is a small part of the package. Would be nice to have at one point though. Without buying new glass.

Same here, This is the first time I have ever tried to shoot moving objects seriously. However people were keen to know if the AFC had improved so I decided to take it on. My previous Pentax cameras stayed firmly stuck on AFS. Maybe I will start doing more of these sort of shots. We have a lot of bald Eagles on the river and they make fine subjects.

[JohnBee]

In the torture tests they used a tripod. not sure how you do normal action shots on a tripod! Usually you are hand held as I was in these or if you are fixed in a seat somewhere maybe a monopod.

I think this was most likely to try and reduce the variances between samples. Though even at that, the test is still at the mercy of human lead tracking(if you think about it).

I guess the best we can ask for is from repeating tests with averages with either excluding or grouping outstanding numbers. All in all, seems like a really challenging test to conduct imo.

[telfish]

As before ful size jpegs at full quality 5 point AFC. 5.6 first batch

You can view the full size images here to check focus http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/13738865/1/Gulls?h=8607cf#gallery:0

[telfish]

second five

[telfish]

third 5