[mcgregni]

It just so happened that I was reading the review of my K-S2 here again and discovered that the standard 11 points for my camera is essentially fancy-shmancy for center weighted. A defined box in the middle of the image with two wings out. Makes sense to me. Now that I'm enlightened.

Are you not mixing up two different things? Focus points are not the same as metering sensor points ....I think my K7 has 77 metering sensor points for full matrix mode .... Not sure how many of these would remain active for centre-weighted ? Maybe they all do, but the more central ones take a higher bias ...?


Or are you saying that actually the centre-weighted area is equivalent to the area covered by the 11 focus points ... ?

[Kath]

I think this promotional video does a decent job of quickly showing some of the usefulness of many AF points. The new Sony a6300, announced today:

Youtu.be

Youtu.be

[anu l]

How many depends on what, exactly, you do. I have a Canon film camera with one focus point and it is fine. My Canon digital has nine focus points and that is fine too. I almost always can be found taking landscapes - perhaps sports photographers, or portraitist, would be less happy with the one focus point.

I think in case of Continuous AF tracking having more and dense AF points is a necessity, I am talking about Nikon's implementation of it's 3D tracking ability.

[cento]

More focus points = better AF-C

[anu l]

In my camera research and reading reviews there seems to an emphasis on many focus points a camera has. Having more is it a marketing gimmick or an actual need for more? Pentax K S2, is conservative with how many focus points compared to the bigger names. How many focus does one really need and use?

I don't think that it is a marketing gimmick. More focus points are very useful when you need focus tracking in case of fast paced action photography.

Here when you don't have enough time to nail the focus point of your choice onto the subject, the more focus points you have, the more chance to have one of you focus points nailing the subject.

Nikon is the master of Tracking. K1 has shown some promise, lets see how much of that promise gets fulfilled.

I've hears the K3 has had many firmware updates which has bettered the tracking performance.