Originally posted by dmdctusa No camera's perfect....just read about focus problems with Canons newest EOS 1D Mk III a $5,000 camera!
On a hot sunny day its autofocus gets about half the images in focus. Just what a pro shooting a summer afternoon baseball game need.
I have never trusted auto focus and the main reason I bought the Pentax K10D it was it was the first DSLR, below the $2K price range, that had a real glass prism and a finder view that I could reliably use for manual focus.
If you really need low light focusing all the time, then the Leica M8 is probably the digital camera of choice.
I thank we have all become to reliant on auto everything. 30 years ago with my first 35mm rangefinder, an Argus C3 - the ultimate manual camera, I could not afford an exposure meter and I learned, just like Cartier-Bresson, to judge my exposure by eye. Eventually I moved up to a Leica M-2 and still did not need a meter.
Ultimately my peers shamed me into getting one....I have forever regretted doing so. Even today with my K10 I don't believe my percentages are any better than they were in the meterless and autofocusless days.
I could not agree more, we are so impatient these days, and if the camera does not do a perfect shot in a second we lose the plot. Yes I do agree the K10D is lousy when focusing in low light, but I do recognize that now and work around it.
Years ago, 25 or so, I shot a wedding, showed up with my 35mm film gear and turned on my camera.. the meter battery was dead.. no chance on a Sat afternoon in suburban Australia in those days to get one, shops closed at noon!!
I called on my brain, shot the whole series using mental calculations, and what really surprised me was that the majority of the images were better exposed than they usually were with the in camera metering!!
The moral of the story is, practice in manual, test to see how many you get right and learn from it. Even focusing, can be manually calcuated, you just have to develop the ability to calculate distance, which is actually harder than exposure guesstimates, but can be developed as a skill.
But that being said, I too think that Pentax could do a better job with the low light focus, I had two P & S Sony cameras that had laser holographic focusing, rarely missed a shot, that feature in Pentax would polish an othewise brilliant camera.
Phil