Face Detect KP and K-1 with new firmware

[JeremieB]

I have KP, can you tell me how to use Face detection autofocus? Also can you tell me if it will work on manual lens(this may sound stupid) but what i meant to say is that i have couple of manual lens and I wish to nail focus on face everytime but end up focusing somewhere elese( even though I thougth that it was in focus in view finder.

LIVE-VIEW only. And switch face recognition on.

There is no way how to do face detection through phase-detect AF in Pentax DSLR world. You'll need hundreds of AF points for such attempts and that is not available on anything but machines like Nikon D6, Canon 1Dx etc.. with 100+ cross type sensors.

Not true ...

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But even those are weak when compared to current hi-end mirrorless beasts which can combine phase-detect with real image processing (contrast detect, countours, shape tracking etc). That is undoable in phase-detect.

In theory you can do all that with the AE sensor, of course with less pixels.

But no, you don't need 16MPX to detect faces or even eyes thanks to neural networks. Of course if you want "eye pupil perfect sharpness", that won't make it, unless you're doing a macro.

It's just that at some point, once it was decided mirrorless was the way to go to simplify and lighten the cameras, there was no sense to pursue what they did on D780 for example, or what Pentax started with K3III. It's surprising how good they could make eye-AF through OVF in K3III (even if of course not comparable with MILCs), considering the feature was non-existant in their previous models.