Af100 Auto focus?

Kindredmachine

Kindredmachine

Well-known member
We already have our AF100 reserved at BHphoto but I'm hearing a couple of conflicting statements regarding the lenses. Some bloggs state that there is NO autofocus or autozoom for the AF100 (100% manual) but I swear I heard Panny say that with certain lenses (Lumix G Vario HD 14-140 maybe?) that the camera could use autofocus, autozoom etc... Can someone please set me straight on this?

Not that we would necessarily use any auto functions but it would be nice to know if it was there or not if we had a run n gun situation.
 
hmm i thought that the final version WILL have it but the test prototypes some people like Bloom had, didn't have that function working yet so perhaps that's where the conflicting reports came from? I'm not sure will wait til smoeone else definitively answers
 
Autofocus depends on the lens. When used with the Lumix 14-140, autofocus works exactly like any video camera you've ever used (with the addition of it being able to do face-detection autofocus and track focus specifically on faces). Autofocus on SLR lenses is not that good, because SLR lenses aren't designed to autofocus video-style. Think about it -- use an SLR lens, and do autofocus, and notice how the lens behaves -- grinding, hunting, jerking, noisy -- do you really want that happening during your filming? Probably not. So while you COULD get pretty much any autofocus lens to autofocus on the AF100, that doesn't mean you'd WANT to. Most of the SLR autofocus lenses will work on the AF100 through using the PUSH AUTO feature, but not during continuous video recording. The 14-140 will.

There is no provision for power zooming, because there are no SLR lenses with a power zoom feature. No lenses have motors in them, so how would you expect there to be the ability to auto zoom them? You can't. It doesn't exist. The only way you could get motorized zoom with an AF100 would be if someone adapts a cinema zoom motor to the outside of a lens.
 
As usual, thank you very much for your input! I'm so use to built in video cameras lenses I didn't even think about the motor issue; just had the old Canon XL1 deattachable lenses on the brain and assumed some Panny lenses would work in th same fasion forgetting that they're SLR lenses.. duh. Maybe Panny will make some new lenses for the AF100 but 95% of our filming is manual or push focus anyway.... does the AF100 even have a rocker or anything for if and when Panny does reelase some power zoom video lenses?
 
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