Will a camera lose it's focus with heavy use?

My K10D is starting to show signs of age now, I have had it over 18 months and put nearly 40k on the clock .. previous user had it for 12 months and did 5k. I have noticed that the focus has shifted slightly and I am starting to miss my target on occasions when using fast apertures. Will a camera do this or maybe its me and not the camera starting to give in to old age?

Justifying that K7 again?

Couldn't be your eyes beginning to lose focus then Mike?

Shhhhh, the wife may see your reply

Might be that the AF need some cleaning it use optics after al, I'm sure some one here can enlighten us more... my camera is also getting old

The autofocus shouldn't 'drift' with age, because your K10D uses the actual image through the lens to adjust focus in the same way that you or I would when using a manual focus lens.

In a system where the camera assessed the distance to the target, then adjusted the lens mechanism to match it without feedback, then it would be possible for the focus system to go out of alignment after heavy use. But a 'passive autofocus' system is inherently self-adjusting. If the mechanism was absolutely knackered of course, then it might not be able to focus properly - but you wouldn't get focus confirmation in that case.

My eye's are slowly losing their focus but my K-7 is holding up well

My K10D is nowhere near as old as a shutter count of 40k (about 13k), but I have seen evidence of the AF adjustment moving.

I described what I found here, and there was some discussion in the posts that followed.

I have no explanation for it, but I'm fairly confident that I didn't imagine it.

So I'm not all that surprised if your K10D's AF could do with some adjustment after all this time, even if it was perfect before.

Interesting, I was asking this question after trying my new 55mm f1.4 (because I have seen a lot of reports saying there is a focus problem with the K10D) and then comparing with the FA 50mm 1.4 which showed exactly the same result .. quite a bit of back focus.

It may be of course, that you're noticing back focus that was always there, but is only evident now with the wafer thin DOF that you get with as wide an aperture as F1.4.

It was what I assumed to be the case when I initially saw back focus with my FA50 F1.4; as I said in that older post, adjusting it cured it, but taking out the adjustment didn't un-cure it, which is what surprised me enough to comment at the time.

It seems pretty likely that Mike-P already had one (or more likely, several) f1.4 lenses before this one