Originally posted by sue When I tried a Canon EOS 450 in the store, pressing the button to take the picture resulted in an immediate picture. With my K200D I feel like I am back with the P&S response.
The problem with any Auto Focus is that it still takes a finite amount of time - no matter how "fast" it is still not instantaneous.
Popular Photography is one of the very few places where they actually test the AF speed
(they don't have the chart for the K200D - but here are the K20D and K100D which kind of spans the range for Pentax dSLR AF) -
Note: the scale on the horizontal (light level) axis on the K20D graph is misaligned - it should be the same as the other graphs.
However having said that - almost any AF (unless it can't focus, hunting) is
WAY faster than we can focus manually -
so how did anyone managed to take fast action shots with manual focus lenses?
as Marc said
Originally posted by Marc Sabatella (eg, half pressing to pre-focus, using center point or user-selectable focus point rather than letting the camera decide what to focus on, etc).
The key is to
Pre-Focus on the spot where the action is likely to occur and trip the shutter when one sees the shot - then the lag is <0.1sec which is faster than most human reaction time and any AF.