I'm noticing a frustrating pattern with AF in both Live View and OVF.
Using AF-C, Zone Auto, the camera has a tendency to pick the water below the bird. This is a pretty high contrast bird, so one would think with the subject recognition it shouldn't have an issue.
This one was taken in Live View - AF - repeat attempts to re-focus kept resulting in the green boxes selecting the water just below the bird, to the right of his reflection in the water.
In this photo, Live View, AF-C, Zone Auto was selected. Zooming in on the back of the camera to the selected focus point shows it focused right on the high-contrast portion of the bird's head/neck. It clearly didn't do a good job.
Back in Live View, 9 point AF, it zooming in on the focus point on the back of the camera shows it supposedly selected the top dark feathers just above the tail feather. I don't see any part of the image that's in focus...
This one was the better of the Birds In Flight photos, oddly using center point select in AF-C
Anyway, lots of examples from this outing where the image just wasn't in focus where the focus point landed. Many were OK, but overall just a consistently inconsistent experience. Take 5 photos, hope one is in focus. These are the frustrations I had with the K5 and primarily the reason I bought the K3-3, but I see little has changed. It's frustrating - I feel like I have maybe 5 photos of the 240 I took that are facebook-worthy. None suitable for printing. What am I doing wrong? The only ones that were decent were the small blackbirds in the tree 3 meters away from me. All taken with the 55-300plm.