John, c'mon, I'm not that much of a newbie ...

As a matter of fact, I do use the centre point in all circumstances (often with the half-press and reframe technique), except for aircraft in flight.

The Auto AF point selection is then much more effective, since it will continue to find the aircraft even if you fail to track it exactly on the centre point.

But you don't shoot moving objects much in low light, do you John?

I find the AF fine too for stationary things in low light.

Admittedly, shooting moving dancers in dark clubs as I sometimes do, is a much tougher ask, and of course, I've become reasonably good at the other techniques, but having to use them makes life a lot harder than I'd like.

'Brilliant' is definitely not a word I'd use about Pentax AF in the harder situations. 'Occasionally Ok', 'Generally frustrating' a lot more so.

It was in Don's response to my earlier comment about workarounds:
I took from that that he was talking about shooting video.

Well of course there isn't. I know that very well

All I'm suggesting is that better would be better, and to blindly accept the necessity to use MF as perfectly Ok, is to communicate to the manufacturer that improvements in that area are unimportant.

I had a play with a Nikon D100 a couple of years ago, with a very ordinary consumer zoom on the front. It was much, much better at getting a quick, positive focus lock in a fairly dark room, than my K10D was, also just with a kit lens on it.

This isn't the rigorous scientific comparison that I'd normally insist on, admittedly, but I was left with the feeling that the Pentax AF struggled a lot more than the Nikon - and a fairly old Nikon at that.

Well, it wasn't clear that you were talking about videoing a wedding.

I was really referring to AF for stills.

The thing is, if the AF hunts in low light, and we focus manually as an alternative, we end up putting up with poor AF instead of demanding better AF from the manufacturer.

I'd still maintain that duality is the wrong word.

"Similar but actually a bit different", as you seem to be saying, is not the same as "exhibiting dualism".

I mean, I don't care, it's not my exhibition. But look it up. The word simply doesn't mean what you're using it to mean, and that introduces a dissonance when people that do know what the word means look at the pictures.

It's another example IMO of why captions generally suck. It's a really, really good series of images, and here we are, trying to work out what the bl***y caption means.

IMO, the series stands on its own. You don't need to stick a posh title on it to get people to engage with, think about, smile at, be impressed with, marvel at, look again at, look yet again at...

... and if you can achieve that, it's what most of us here would love to be able to do.

Agreed.

But Don, this is the year 2010.

Manual focus in those circumstances is now what we call a "work around".

It's comments like that, that make Pentax say to themselves... "ah well, guys, we don't need to bother for another few months, with customers like that".

Yes. 'Duality' is completely wrong given its usual meaning.

But I do like the set. It's a great example of how a series can be so much more than its constituent images.

There are two pairs that I can see. Two don't have a strap over their shoulder.

And another two have a plain hair band, with the third having what looks like a small bow on it. A bit tenuous, I confess, the latter one

The monkeys could do with a little shadow detail work, perhaps.

In fact, on reflection, I'd suggest that you consider leaving out the monkeys altogether. Although the poses are similar, they're not facing the same way. It leaves me feeling that although the shadows are paired well, the others are just so much stronger that their strength seems to draw attention to the monkeys' relative weakness.

Terrific observational work though.

This doesn't surprise me all that much. It's almost impossible to tell how sharp things are, once x-thousand pixels have been resampled to a screen width.

I'd hope the 100% crops can be distinguished, though.

I have no axe to grind either. My only dSLR ever is the K10D, so I can't make any comparison at all.

It just seems an extraordinary claim that a 6MP camera from 7 years ago can produce better images than a current model with over twice the pixels.

I'm genuinely interested in whatever it may be that contributes to the perception. And without testing side by side, and also considering the workflow that leads to the final image, understanding this is virtually impossible.

And on the same topic, having installed Windows 7 yesterday, any potential monitor calibrators out there may be interested to hear that the Pantone Huey Pro software (v1.5) also works.