Infinity focus on 18-135

What Date is April 1st this year?

Don't know cause I haven't got a calendar!

I don't plan to try it, since I don't like it when hunting AF makes a lens whomp into the stop.

But I wonder if most lenses end up around the infinity mark when they give up trying to focus?

I'd be surprised if you could get actual focus confirmation with any lens if you point it at genuinely featureless blue sky, or blank smooth wall.

In my experience they will flick from one end of their range to the other and give up around infinity. Handy if you want a lens to retract before turning the camera off, just point it at a blank wall, half press, and the lens eventually retracts!

Yes that's what I was trying

My experience of the 18-135 with K200D is that there are times when it won't focus. Both the 18-55 and the 55-300 on the K200 will hunt and then give up. The 18-135 gives up without hunting. Moving to a high contrast area or else manually de-focus the lens then "kick-starts" it.

Perhaps this lens prevents hunting by not even trying when it does not know what to do.

I am very impressed with the lens (but then I don't have any star or limited lenses....yet)

Perhaps this thread should be "..to infinity and beyond...."

Just to jump back, MF lenses tend to have a hard stop at infinty, AF don't. I think it's to protect the lens from damaging itself.

Eh? Mine do.

The 18-135 is the only one I've ever had that doesn't.

Edit: or do you mean exactly at infinity?
Edit2: actually, my FA 50 1.4 has a hard stop which corresponds exactly to the infinity mark. My others seem to go a bit beyond.

I suspect that the more expensive AF lenses have an "exact" infinity stop while the cheaper models don't. I know I cleaned some fungus from the front of an old F 80-200mm a while ago which had a lot of play between the marked infinity and the actual end stop.

Made it interesting trying to set infinity focus properly after cleaning it!

It's quite often found in telephoto lenses that there is movement beyond infinity. The reason is that expansion of the lens body and glass can cause shifts in the position of infinity. The more bulk in the lens the more the point will shift.

If you want to take a picture of a featureless blue sky it won't matter whether you're in focus or not. It will look the same out of focus as it will in focus.