Well I'm not.
I use Auto AF point selection for FJs, specifically because I can't reliably keep them on the centre AF point, but I can reliably keep them within the bounds of the AF point array.

So far, this is nothing to do with AF-S or -C.

Additionally, I often use AF-C. Clearly, it's not predictive enough (is it predictive at all?), and therefore not brilliant.

But it's not terrible all the time.

Certainly AF-S is sometimes a disaster if the aircraft's distance is changing fast enough. Then it just doesn't lock, and the shutter doesn't fire at all. At least the AF-C tries to keep up, and often the depth of field is enough.

Me too.


Walking poles (especially two, ski-stylee) always strike me as being much more of an annoyance than a help, but I have a Leki with a tripod screw on it, and I use it with my Slik AF2100 on it occasionally.

I do mean AF-C, yes, although I wouldn't say I use it all the time, and in fact I only use it to any significant extent at airshows.

Haven't used either of the lenses you refer to - most of my recent airshow stuff has been exclusively with the 55-300, although I'm getting fairly desperate for something longer.

I'd describe AF-C on the K10D as 'not bad' rather than good, but it's definitely better than AF-S if the camera-to-subject distance is changing very fast. And the more you can do to help it, by getting the thing prefocused as close to the right distance as possible (I couldn't do without quickshift either), the less work it has to do so the quicker it is.

It's a black art really, with lots of frustration, any attempt to do FJ work with the K10D. Hopefully I'll have a K-5 and a Bigma by the time the next Farnborough comes round.

That said, even if I'm using AF-S with aircraft, the same argument about Auto-AF-spot selection applies.

This isn't really a big deal at all - it can already do that. Aircraft in flight are usually set against a relatively featureless background, and there's usually nothing in the foreground for it to get confused with. So as I said above, Auto-Af-point selection achieves exactly that.

What would be a lot more useful, would be something that could tell the difference between birds and twigs, so that as a small bird hops around in a tree, and you follow it with the camera, it keeps the bird in focus.

Except at airshows using AF-C.

I defy most people to pan so accurately as to keep a fast jet hurtling past at 400 mph bang in the centre AF spot.

If you can't, and I certainly can't, what happens is that you get it slightly wrong, and the lens hunts to infinity and you lose all sight of the aircraft in the VF.

Auto-AF-spot every time at airshows.

The background is almost invariably featureless, in which case the camera is much better at choosing what I'm looking at than I am.

It's the only case, mind you. Otherwise, I'm with Don. You have to be a bit careful with extreme wide-angles, because the recompose can dramatically change the subject distance from the focal plane.

Just the Huey software. v1.5, which can be downloaded apparently, though I received it on a CD.

If anyone's interested, it works fine with Windows 7, both 32 bit and 64 bit.

Might just be worth noting that just because you can see all the grey shades, doesn't mean the monitor is properly calibrated.

It's a start, certainly, but by no means the whole story.

I only started getting decent prints back from online printers after I calibrated mine with a Huey.

I don't think the OP's intensity is unreasonable. He's clearly a passionate guy, who expects a top-of-the-range camera that he's spent about £1000 on to actually work. He's very disappointed to discover what seems to be quite a serious issue, and I don't blame him.

I remember being deeply disappointed, almost four years ago now, when I finally splashed out on the K10D, to discover that the stop-down-metering mode simply didn't work right. It's old news now, but I was quite wound up about it at the time.

The wireless flash issue reported by others, and this tungsten light AF issue do seem to point to a very poor standard of testing by the manufacturer. Neither is a particularly obscure condition, and it's not acceptable IMO for Pentax to miss them.

There's plenty of anecdotal noise on that thread, and there are some who haven't experienced the issue (which, incidentally, is very different from there being no issue), and there seems to be a lack of clarity as to what the precise issue actually is.

But there are clearly a number who are experiencing low-light- and/or tungsten-light-related AF issues. And it also seems that Pentax Spain has acknowledged it.

It does the cause no service at all to minimise such issues.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that there's ever any *intention* to be anything but impartial, or impugning your or anyone else's motives in the slightest.

Nor am I suggesting you change the way you do your own reviews. Anyone that reviews anything should do it as they see fit, and that is perfectly fine, although they have to realise that others will not necessarily agree with either the approach or the results. I always found PU mag reviews lightweight in the extreme, for instance, but that's not to say others might not have enjoyed them.

Inevitably, though, there will always be an element of "well they would say that wouldn't they" about glowing reviews from people so close to home, as it were. That's not a criticism, it's just the way it is.

With respect, any review from you John, or indeed from Dan, is inevitably going to be seen as potentially biased.

You're an evangelist for the brand, and that's a good thing. But in the almost four years since I've been here, I don't think I've read a single view you've expressed about anything Pentax that isn't entirely positive, often in the face of some quite bad experiences of Pentax recounted by members here.

Personally, I find reviews more plausible and convincing when they don't come from someone with a known and strong bias.

Not saying there's anything wrong intrinsically with being biased, and strongly positive views can sometime provide a useful counter to strong negative ones.

But the glowing review of the K-5, for instance, over at DPR, has more impact than it would have done if it had been in PU mag, and to my mind is a lot more convincing, precisely because they are the last people to have any pro-Pentax bias.

Can DFS be switched off properly with the K-5?