1) The camera is made to a price, and the CCD is eating most of that price. So the rest must be CHEAP; the AF module is taken from the company´s cheapest film body. On that body, it was capable to focus a cheap consumer zoom on a full frame of print film just enough to make a decent drugstore print from it. Now it has to focus on a much smaller CCD instead. The DSLR is bought by other people than the "plastic crowd"; they put good lenses on them, shoot more demanding subjects, and want to print much bigger on their inkjets. So they enlarge the small image far more, and the AF sensor is just not up to a task it was never designed for; a lot of the pictures are out of the tolerance interval.
2) Price again, in a way: if you make an AF sensor that covers an area exactly the size of the AF markers on the focussing screen, it has to be very well aligned in assembly. This takes too much time, so the sensors are made to cover far more, so the markers should fall inside the sensitivity area. No problem for most pictures, but if you thry to cocus on a small flower among leaves of grass and place the AF marker on the flower only, chances are that some of the grass will be inside the real AF area and get locked on instead.
Solutions: either buy a real pro DSLR or be prepared to focus manually a lot of the time. The first alternative is out for most of us, so it has to be the second. Sadly enough, my experience with the E-10 was that it was almost impossible to focus manually; that´s one of the reasons I "upgraded" to that D60. It is a lot better, but far from perfect, because the screen is made for clarity, not for focussing. What I´m waiting for now is NOT higher MP count, it is a realistically priced DSLR with replaceable screens, and one with microprism circle among these.
Per
2003-12-07 kl. 03.12 skrev Bill Ellis:
I'm using an Olympus E-20,but I think my question would apply to both users.
Do any of you have focusing problems ? I enlarge the image on the monitor
when I want to see how sharp it is and if I can reshoot what I want to be
better. At times no matter what I seem to do some images just won't be
sharp. I know you have to have the focusing rectangle in the center on your
point of focus and I realize you have very little depth of field in front of
where you are focusing. I'm just wondering if there is something I'm not
doing.
Thanks for any help..comments,
