[Ian Stuart Forsyth]

On the D800 does face detection only work in live view?

Nope it works in PDAF also

[ThorSanchez]

My regular commute involved 1-2 hours of crawling at 5-10 mph and the knee on my clutch leg was going out. I went over to the dark side in 2012 with the Mazda 3 5-door, 5-speed being replaced with a 3.5L Altima Coupe with shiftable CVT. I still miss the Mazda, but not in heavy traffic.

FWIW, I could have purchased the Altima with a 6-speed, but by all accounts it had beastly linkage.

Steve

(...1-2-3-2-3-2-3-N-N-N-1-2-3...)

I completely get the pain of a bumper-to-bumper commute with a manual. It's not fun the few days a year I have to go to DC for meetings. That's a use case where even a dedicated manual transmission driver could get behind autonomy.

[zeitlos]

Okay guys, one last attempt to save my Pentax soul... hope you can do it

I just got the Sony A7 III today. Well, I don't particularly like the EVF (from an "optical" point of view ). However, I like it's functions.
As you can see here (Some travel issues with Pentax lenses. Or: Will there be a 15-30mm f4. anytime "soon" - Page 3 - PentaxForums.com) I just took two pictures, (one K-1, One Sony). What I like/love about the Sony is that you have so many focus points you can freely choose from. You all know that we are kind of restricted to the center when it comes to Pentax. I assume it would have been hard for me to compose the "Sony picture" with a K-1 without risking lose the point I focused at (the eyes), since I would have to pivot and this isn't the best thing to do, I suppose.

Here are my questions:

- Will we see (from a technical point of view) a much wider area to choose focus points from or is this technically impossible to do for a DSLR? If I remember correctly also Nikons and Canons mostly have there focus points stuck to the center of the viewfinder...

- Shifting focus via touchscreen is a nice thing. Am I right when I say it's possible for Pentax to do this even on a DSLR?

Thanks for all your expertise.

[SSGGeezer]

Okay guys, one last attempt to save my Pentax soul... hope you can do it

I just got the Sony A7 III today. Well, I don't particularly like the EVF (from an "optical" point of view ). However, I like it's functions.
As you can see here (Some travel issues with Pentax lenses. Or: Will there be a 15-30mm f4. anytime "soon" - Page 3 - PentaxForums.com) I just took two pictures, (one K-1, One Sony). What I like/love about the Sony is that you have so many focus points you can freely choose from. You all know that we are kind of restricted to the center when it comes to Pentax. I assume it would have been hard for me to compose the "Sony picture" with a K-1 without risking lose the point I focused at (the eyes), since I would have to pivot and this isn't the best thing to do, I suppose.

Here are my questions:

- Will we see (from a technical point of view) a much wider area to choose focus points from or is this technically impossible to do for a DSLR? If I remember correctly also Nikons and Canons mostly have there focus points stuck to the center of the viewfinder...

- Shifting focus via touchscreen is a nice thing. Am I right when I say it's possible for Pentax to do this even on a DSLR?

Thanks for all your expertise.

You can shift your focus points using your 4 way controller, but covering the entire sensor view field with focus points has its own trade offs based on what smart folks here have posted. Are you just referring to a wider and more numerous field of sensors, or selectability of the single or group of points you want to use at that moment?

[zeitlos]

Are you just referring to a wider and more numerous field of sensors,

Yes, that's what I meant. I always do select where to put focus to. However, I'm more or less restricted to the center (and more or less closely around it). Will it be expanded (as it is possible in Liveview) for the optical viewfinder also someday or is this not/hardly possible for an OVF camera/DSLR?

[zeitlos]

Having used eye af for a while now all I can say is that it‘s a revelation. Hope that Pentax finds a way to implement it into their cameras.

[pxt]

More usefull will be set AF point to all range of viewfinder.

[Peteb82]

There is no real reason they cannot put eye focus into a dslr.

Very few dslr's produced today do not have live view.

People like myself who have very bad eye sight can really be helped by the addition of eye focus.

Eye focus will be the reason i leave pentax.

I used to be a studio photographer and didn't need eye focus.

But moving now mostly into weddings then missing focus really isn't an option.

I manual focus at weddings in life light because pentax isn't great with low light and speed. The subjects moving on the dance floor unfortunately don't stand still lol.

Continuous eye focus would be a blessing for pentax dslr.

Someone said pentax will focus on what's not already out there..... please show me which dslr has eye focus?
None?
Right so then pentax can happily give us something new and not offered elsewhere then can't they

[ZombieArmy]

Not having a manual transmission is a 110% deal breaker for me. No manual, no sale.

This is why I will never own lots of luxury cars, SUVs, & even a lot of sports cars like the Nissan GTR. No clutch pedal & no shifter = less engaging for me. I've been wanting to get a Chevrolet SS sedan with a 6-speed manual, Cadillac ATS-V, or a CTS-V, but man! They are very hard to come by. It's really hard to find one with a 6-speed manual.

I also use Linux. Hahahaaha!

You need yourself a Lada Niva, the SUV that has it all! Manual gear box, dif lock, steering wheel and some even have seats!

[biz-engineer]

Over 90% of vehicles sold in the US have some type of automatic transmission.

I don't know the exact figure, but in Europe, 90% of people prefer to use manual gear shifting, the overall consumption is less and it is quicker to adapt depending on terrain (mountains etc). There is a parallel with camera, I was hiking for 4 days in the Alps with the Pentax K1 on one battery that still had a one bar charge indicator after taking 300 exposures. If I had a mirrorless camera, I'd need to recharge it every day or bring four batteries.

I've driven car with manual and automatic transmission. It was a matter of getting used to each kind of transmission. I shift gears manually without thinking about it. It's just that over a week of driving on vacation with an automatic gear shifting car I spend 50 Euros more refueling.

There is a parallel between Eye AF, car auto-transmission and GPS, mobile phones, they all appeal to laziness, and when you use them you can't seem to be able to do without anymore because you lose skills. It's like buying frozen fish and meat at the supermarket, it is so easy that people don't even know how it can there, and if there was an electricity blackout for 6 months, most people in the cities would be incapable of feeding themselves...

People nowadays are like greenhouse plants.

[MarkJerling]

Having used eye af for a while now all I can say is that it‘s a revelation. Hope that Pentax finds a way to implement it into their cameras.

Thanks for all your answers. Seems pretty clear that we won't see it on a Pentax.

Eye AF only works in LiveView in some DSLRs. Currently, there is no capability, with any manufacturer, (to my knowledge) to combine Eye AF with an optical viewfinder.
So, not only will you not see it on a Pentax DSLR, you won't see it on any other DSLR, even those equipped with Eye AF, if those cameras are not used in LiveView mode.

[clackers]

Btw, the Pentax face tracking in Live View is a defacto eye focus, for those who claim that somehow they can't seem to take portraits or event pics!

[biz-engineer]

the Pentax face tracking in Live View is a defacto eye focus

Experiments show it is. Turn face and Pentax LV AF isn't able to locate the face. For what I've seen, Pentax face detect AF looks for a pattern of two round circles. Enabling focus peaking shows that the eyes are the most in focus part of a face when using face detect AF. Ricoh should improve their firmware so that the user can switch faces when more than one face is in the frame; I haven't found a way to switch between faces for face detect with the K1 and haven't found anything relevant in the K1 manual.

[Ian Stuart Forsyth]

Eye AF only works in LiveView in some DSLRs. Currently, there is no capability, with any manufacturer, (to my knowledge) to combine Eye AF with an optical viewfinder.
So, not only will you not see it on a Pentax DSLR, you won't see it on any other DSLR, even those equipped with Eye AF, if those cameras are not used in LiveView mode.

The more I use a DSLR that has face detect while using the optical viewfinder I find it will select the AF found under the closet eye to the camera with startling success for most uses. Looking thru the OVF will give you real time user feedback to where it has selected AF points/points. It wasn't until I used this feature for sometime that I find out it was indeed selecting the AF nearest to the eye, when using the supplied software for viewing the raw file it would only tell you that the face was detected and it focused on that face only later did I find it would use the nearest AF point to the eye and this was in a 2012 camera. With the newer DSLR's with the higher resolution metering sensor along with more AF point the camera is better able to track the location of the eye at further distances than I am able to with the D800.

Where the camera stops tracking the eye is usually at a working distance where the DOF is great enough that focusing on the eye is less critical under most working conditions. If I am shooting a great deal of single framed people in a confined time frame I will use face detect most of the time now





What appears as AF delay in the video is the delay of AF of the iPhone and not the camera

[biz-engineer]

Where the camera stops tracking the eye is usually at a working distance where the DOF is great enough that focusing on the eye is less critical under most working conditions.

While true, go explain that to customers who are already seduced by the eye AF feature on mirrorless cameras. You may be right, but you don't have the marketing budget to advertise your logic. Successful people are often the one who exploit general trends rather than trying to figure out what's technically correct. The mass got sold on eye-Af, so now it's time to exploit that opportunity, i.e get people's money against the eye AF feature.