Originally posted by pres589 Norm, when you say that "AF is still a frill", are you really manually focusing that much on a camera without a split prism focusing screen?
Heck no. While people like to portray me as a brand loyalist, really I just like to buy bodies that work with the lenses I own. The lens that got me into a *ist D was the Tamron 35-300 macro adaptal. I loved that lens on my ME. However the guy at the store convinced me to buy a Sigma 70-300 and I never actually used the Tarmon on the *ist D. The point I'm making is if you don't expect camera to do anything for you, what a Pentax does is just great. Whether or not others are better is moot. Others are better, it's always been true. When I bought my Pentax Program Plus, I could ha e bought either Pentax AF or a Nikon F4. I just don't think of AF as something you buy a camera for. If it has AF, it's good enough. Great AF is only worth paying for, for a select few.
Unfortuntaley there are a lot of folks who have convinced themselves they are part of that select few. I've never been that delusional.
There are very few images I miss because of Pentax AF. Most of the time it's because I wasn't able to stabilize the camera enough and I've moved more than SR can compensate for. People seem to forget, the best SR and AF have their limits, nothing is fool proof.
If you are familiar with MF techniques, all AF is amazing. The question is do you want amazing or more amazing? Some folks insist amazing isn't good enough for them.
When people talk about AF they seem to think in absolutes. I think, well I get 90% of the images I want with Pentax AF, probably 5% of the images it doesn't get , no AF is going to help, leaving maybe 5% of my images where better AF would have helped. I'm not willing to pay much for that.
It's never absolute, it's always situational. If the AF is adequate for the situations you find yourself in, better AF is moot. I love those Canon and Nikon images of the owl flying across a field straight at the camera, but I have never been in a situation where I had chance for one of those images. It's great those cameras have great tracking, but so far in 63 years of shooting, I have had no opportunities for those types of shots, thus that's completely irrelevant to me. If something changes and I start getting those kinds of opportunities, maybe I'll think differently.