Hi there everybody!
As you might know from my introduction, I am a new owner of a K-3 and back in the Pentax world again. I've had the camera for a little over a week now and hadn't had much time to play with it. Yesterday I went on my first real "shoot" and it was basicly the first real test the camera got. I went to a formation dancing tournament for latin dances. The trainer of one team is a close friend of mine and this seemed to be a good chance to test my new K-3.
Now I know that Pentax isn't really first choice for shooting sports. The last camera I worked with however was a Canon EOS 300D with a relatively cheese lens and that had worked fine for me. I didn't expect my K-3 to have an AF like a Nikon D4, but I
did expect it to outperform the EOS 300D!
My conclusion:
Either my camera is broken or the Pentax AF seriously sucks rocks! Sorry if this is a buzz-kill!
I missed a lot of moments yesterday because the camera took too long to focus. These dancers do move quickly, but not so much in the directions that make much of a difference to the AF. And even if they move towards the camera or away from it, they are not sprinting or as challenging to focus on as a tennis ball thrown at the camera. One thing dancers do very frequently is turn around. I shot a lot of butts yesterday, which in the case of the girls usually look pretty good.
But they were not what I was aiming for. What I was aiming for was the pose 2 or 3s earlier. Sure I missed moments with the Canon, but those were less by far!
Just so you can see what I mean:
I shot about 360 photos yesterday, 139 of which were not during the actual dancing, but afterwards (handing out of trophies, posing, being happy about winning). The other 220 were of the dancing. I only shot one team which danced twice for about 5 minutes each round. Of these 220 photos I threw out 41 because they were completely out of focus. 57 I threw out because of "missed moments". Of the 139 after the dancing, only a handful had issues with the focus. I had time there to wait for the focus to happen - or not.
I don't know if this is relevant, but of the 139 photos three were completely over-exposed. All were shot with a flash. When I shot portraits of couples, I shot a fair amount of redundancy. Then it happened that of three practically identical portraits one was completely over-exposed.
Now don't get me wrong! Among those remaining photos there is still a great deal of crap, like where I messed up the composition, the shots weren't to flattering or the like. But those are mistakes
I made. I just don't need the camera to make mistakes for me.
My gear:
- K-3 (obviously) with firmware v1.02
- kit lens DA 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 WR (and some other letters)
- D-BG5
- Metz 58 AF-2
The place was a gym, pretty well lit, but not enough for the kind of shutter speed I wanted. This was not the kind of light were you could run into trouble with the focus because of low light. I set the camera to X, shutter speed 1s/180 and aperture f/5.6. The flash was set to P-TTL and aimed directly forward. The dancers had a distance to me of something between 2.5m and 10m.
The whole thing smelled pretty fishy to me, so I did a completely unscientific test today. I went outside in front of the house, sat on the stairs there and tested the focus speed on both the Canon and Pentax. It was early afternoon, so there was plenty of light, which was soft because it was overcast. I first aimed at a grating, about 60cm from me and then at a barn, maybe 100 or 150m from me on the other side of the road. I went back and forth a few times. The Canon 300D was fitted with an EF 28-80 3.5-5.6 IV Ultrasonic. I tried the Pentax out with the kit lens and with a Sigma 85mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM. Both AFs were set to single shot.
Result:
The old and cheesy Canon was significantly faster!
I didn't use a stop watch because the Canon was just so fast that I couldn't have pushed the button that quickly. Using my "internal timer", I'd say the Canon takes about 0.1 to 0.2 seconds to focus between the two points. The K-3 takes nearly a full second to do the same trick. I can nearly always say the German word for twenty one, which has four syllables, before the beep. From time to time, I get cut off after the third syllable - never earlier. Even if the Canon hunts (goes completely past the focus point and back again), it is still much faster than the K-3 in best time!
What I also noticed:
When focussing, the K-3 at first moves smoothly, then stops and then seems to
"tick" the lens again twice or more before reaching focus. My Sigma primes show this behaviour with two or three (sometimes even 5) audible
"tocks" before focus is reached.
Is this all normal or could my K-3 actually be broken?
Kind regards,
Pix
P.S. Sorry about the long text! I guess I'm a little upset because to me this camera cost a lot of money and seems to be outperformed (in terms of AF) by an entry-level DSLR that is 10 years old (and the lens is even older).