03-05-2014, 01:25 PM
It depemds on what you want and what you are intending to photograph. I use my prime lenses on manual focus even though I prefer to purchase auto focus lenses for flexibity so they need to have reasonably decent focusing. I am more interested in accurate and repeatable auto fous than what is claimed to be fast focus. I say claimed because how do you prove fast ? Doing what and under what conditions ? Your own technique has a lot to do with whether you claim the lens is up to speed or not.
I use a tripod for many of my photographs, when you to get to good quality 24 or 36 MP sensors there are obvious differences between tripod and hand held shots. That is even without considering the extra quality of framing of your photos and considering what you are doing.
It is much like rhose say camera A is better than camera B because you think it produces better EI 6400 photos. I could look at the same photo and disagree on that. Plus I have absolute;y no interest in EI 6400.
I also don't live in a solar challenged part of the world. Although it does usually rain here from May to mid August the rain is mainly frontal not a combination of mizzle, drizzle and showers. Even when there is some cloud around at first light it eill be burnt off by around 8AM in summer and 10 AM in winter. I may have something around 30 cloudy/hazy days a year but the rest will be blue skies.
The light I encounter is high intensity, high contrast light so what you may consider a problem with slow AF is not going to cause me the same problems. Mid day in the middle of winter at up to 1/1500 at f 8.0 at EI 400 . So a f 4.0 zoom to me may need to be a f 1.4 zoom somewhere else. If such a thing would be possible.
I use a tripod for many of my photographs, when you to get to good quality 24 or 36 MP sensors there are obvious differences between tripod and hand held shots. That is even without considering the extra quality of framing of your photos and considering what you are doing.
It is much like rhose say camera A is better than camera B because you think it produces better EI 6400 photos. I could look at the same photo and disagree on that. Plus I have absolute;y no interest in EI 6400.
I also don't live in a solar challenged part of the world. Although it does usually rain here from May to mid August the rain is mainly frontal not a combination of mizzle, drizzle and showers. Even when there is some cloud around at first light it eill be burnt off by around 8AM in summer and 10 AM in winter. I may have something around 30 cloudy/hazy days a year but the rest will be blue skies.
The light I encounter is high intensity, high contrast light so what you may consider a problem with slow AF is not going to cause me the same problems. Mid day in the middle of winter at up to 1/1500 at f 8.0 at EI 400 . So a f 4.0 zoom to me may need to be a f 1.4 zoom somewhere else. If such a thing would be possible.