In just about every sense I can think of, the FA50mm f/1.7 is an "underrated" lens. It's rendered rather superbly for everything I've tried with it. FYI it's also about 95% identical to its slightly earlier Pentax sibling, the F50mm f/1.7, which I had briefly, but didn't like quite as much as the FA50 for reasons too subjective and trivial to mention.
Well there’s certainly nothing wrong with that image.
I understand and feel your pain. I can vouch for the Oly 40-150mm f 2.8 PRO being better/beat for the use case. I have found mine to give me the highest keeper rate with doggoes of all sizes and speeds. You will still have issues that you mentioned but shooting at 25 FPS will give you enough samples to have options to keep. It's a camera/processing power issue not a lens issue. The Oly 40-150mm f 2.8 PRO has dual linear AF motora to help with that. Also a huge impact and the AF is light, the OM-1 changes it's performance drastically between front /bright light, shade/cloudy light and indirect/low light. For me in the winter the OM-1 makes be question my life choices and in the summer makes me happy enough that I forget about the C-AF problem.
Reminds me of my sweet boy of 15 years. I miss him so much! Dogs are such amazing and special creatures.
Its the false positives that annoy me most; out in the field, lcd shows that the camera is tracking/detecting my dog's head but that doesn't translate at all in terms of the resultant hit rate. At best I'm getting a 35-40% hit rate on average, for every decent photo there is many more which are out of focus for no good reason; the focus drifts during a sequence too erratically for me and the focus always seem to attach itself to by dog's side/back rather than her head! Is the 40-150 really going to do that much better than the 40mm end of the 12-40 f2.8.? I'm in two minds at present as I'm not really seeing a much better hit rate than when I had the Olympus E-M1.2 with no subject detection. When I tried the Canon R8, i don't feel like it lied to me as much but did struggle the closer the subject came to the camera but at least the display didn't indicate that it was successfully tracking my dog at this point. I even tried downgrading the firmware of the OM-1 back a few updates but can't say that I noticed much if any difference.
In all fairness, Chris, manually focusing on a standing doggie is a touch easier than an AF system focussing on a running dog ... Don't you think?
