New K100Y + 3 Lenses

bob5050 wrote:

Roland Karlsson wrote:

It is not only a matter of percent. It is also a matter of functionality.

• Feature detection, e.g. face detection, but also other stuff
• Reliable following an object and having enough AF points to follow rather small objects.
• [...]

These seem like two different things to me. I'd argue that having a focus joystick implies a lot more focus points: you can't smoothly move the focus point around the screen with only a couple of dozen points (the K-3 has 27, K-1 has 33). Nor could you do touch-screen focus-selection. A greater density is required.

Face detection, on the other hand, is an entirely different question that might be phrased another way from the camera's perspective: "In the lack of any user instructions otherwise, how should I pick one focus point over another as primary?" That's solved with an object recognition rule: if something looks like a face, focus on that. Basically, it's an automation of the focus joystick function, so again requires a much-increased density of fixed focus points. Finding a face doesn't do any good if you don't have it covered.

The provision of a focus joystick implies to me that the focus point array is significantly denser. That would seem to be a hardware prerequisite to the rest.

bob5050

That is a sound and interesting reasoning. That joystick is a hint.

And, you need lots of AF points for most advanced functionalities. Hundreds of them, at least. You cannot X-Y follow anything with 33 focus points. This does not mean that the poor processor in the camera need to analyze them all. It is, as you say, a matter of density.