Opinions on focus comparison please

Leaving aside the colour balance differences, doing A/B comparisons of the crops in PSP (after exactly matching the sizes and rotation), confirms my initial impression that the top crop (K5) is both sharper and less noisy. Look at the top and bottom of the eyes, for example. However, the sides of the eyes are slightly sharper on the 50D (but the difference is less than the difference vertically, I'd say). The mouth top and bottom edges look sharper on the K5 too.

So if it's down to focus, I'd say the K5 focused marginally better - but I wonder if there is an element of slight camera shake too?

TBH the difference is so small it's hard to say but you could only really tell if the test was done under exact conditions. Remember that the Canon is more than 2 years older than the Pentax but at the end of the day I think it shows that the K-5 is not lacking in the sharpness stakes.

As for the different methods of testing I remember when Richard was an active member and I took a peek at his Flickr page .. 99% of his pictures were of different tests, very few were what I would call actual photographs. We can get too hung up on the equipment and sometimes forget why we started photography to begin with. (myself included at times).