Live view autofocus on Pentax cameras

JeremieB wrote:

My understanding is that the K3III would have the best LV AF. The K70/KF should normally be the best as it shares something with MILCs (phase detect AF points on the sensor supposed to help CDAF in LV), but in the end not really - I'd say K3III is better.

You don't get zebras but red highlight alerts. You can't change the color.

On K3III you have 2 focus peaking modes: one that emphasizes contours, the other shows only contours. Both can be useful.

Even with K3III, AF in LV is rather slow. With K3III you have less risk of having it focusing all the way from close to infinity and back (which can take ages on K70). So it's delicate, and AF C of joggers or other moving things can be frustrating honestly. With patience and precision it's usable not much more. On static subjects it's ok.

You get face detection and AF tracking, but not both at the same time: it detects the faces correctly but won't AF-C on detected face(s).

Personally 99% of the time when I use LV, I use it in manual focusing with focus peaking (landscape, macro). Whenever fast AF matters, I use OVF.

Thanks for your very useful response.

To be clear I wouldn’t be relying on AF-C for joggers but on AF-S and mashing the shutter button (having already pre-focused in the area). Because all the cameras I like have rubbish AF-C (panasonic, Fuji and now, pentax), I have accepted that AF-C is a non-starter (as is tracking). On panasonic and Fuji, I get better results just relying on the speed of focus acquisition in AF-S and not leaving a lag before i take the photo. As long as the subject isn’t moving fast, I can get a good result. The question is how good is the LV AF-S on these cameras? Unfortunately, for many shots, I don’t like the angle I get standing upright with the camera to my eye so the viewfinder isn’t for me.

Thanks again for responding.