[mattdm]

Thanks for the link. The article says basically the same thing I was saying in message #6 of this thread, where I talked about the geometry of camera-to-subject (or is it subject-to-camera?) distances. Except that the article suggests that you don't have to shooting ultrawide for this to make a difference, which I find doubtful -- but intriguing enough that you've persuaded me to give the "manually selected AF point option" another try. I can't imagine using it for shooting most of what I do, where I have almost no time at all to set up the shot. But I think I'll at least do some tests in the next day or two and see if I can see a difference between focus and recompose, on the one hand, and manually selecting the focus point without moving the camera, on the other. Will try to post back here with my impressions or findings, especially if I come up with anything interesting.

This site (from the dpreview thread mentioned above) goes a bit into the geometry. I haven't bothered to double-check if it's right, since I've (kind of to my surprise) found it most convenient to move the focus point around.

Don't recompose!