Several years back, I wrote about
how Pentax can improve their autofocus system. The most important factor I noted was to allow arbitrary combinations of AF points to work together and indicate focus at the same time:
Originally posted by bwDraco Allow any number of AF points to work together, even if they are not connected to each other. This is the single most important thing Pentax can do to improve AF performance. It requires treating each point as a separate entity, yet allowing them to be used simultaneously in an arbitrary arrangement. Doing so eliminates many of the issues and limitations listed above and paves the way for much more advanced predictive tracking algorithms to be implemented. It may be possible to implement this for current cameras via a firmware update, but hardware limitations may prevent this from happening.
...and it appears that in the K-1, they've implemented just that. Notice that in the following video (starting from 0:26), arbitrary AF point combinations are indeed being shown:
This is a huge deal to me. With the overhauled AF and AE algorithms, this should mean a non-trivial improvement in tracking performance. Even though DPReview reports that the camera transitions to different points rather slowly, I suspect the keeper rate will be noticeably higher, even at the slower 4.4 fps full-frame (or 6.5 fps APS-C) continuous shooting rate.
Questions, thoughts, or comments? Is anyone with a pre-production K-1 able to confirm or deny this?