Sharpness of Digital Photos

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my 5D. It's just that I didn't figure the 1.5 thing into my shutter speed, and it was low light ( i was shooting in a mode). So, when i went and did things properly, razor sharp, just like my film body. The filter I was using was a cheap UV filter. It may need cleaning, I haven't looked at it since removal. Just throwing some ideas out there for the original poster.

Glad to see some more KM owners on here. :)

edit: Have you tried it with the "beercan" yet? WOAH!!

The beercan?....Behold.....One of the first lenses I bought way back in the day.

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Originally Posted by Ronnoco

We are talking apples and oranges. Michael is wrong. Digital cameras do not keep sharpness low so that it can be added later.

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Wrong. For Bayer sensors, the image processing applies sharpness in-camera to counteract the effect of interpolation of the color filter array and the decoding of the pixels. This is used to counter the softness introduced when the image is being formed.

Canon is well known for leaving images somewhat "soft" allowing the user to add the required sharpening to taste. Other manufacturers add more in-camera processing.

This is softness due to the sensor and its associate electronics. There is also sharpness due to the lens, good or bad. These are two separate issues. Lenses determine the sharpness of the optical images that falls onto the sensor. The in-camera sharpening handles the softness due to the sensor processing itself.

I don't have experience with a lot of different digital cameras, but my Fuji S2 DSLR has different settings for sharpness - I use the middle of the three, which leaves them a little soft. The "hard" setting is pretty much for people who want to print right off the card which obviously won't give you the best results but may be fine in some applications (events photos where you're making small prints right away, I'd think). Sharpness can also be turned off, but I've gotten used to the setting I use so I stick with it.

My Nikon Coolpix 5000 images look great right out of the camera. They typically don't need any sharpening (although I'm not doing big prints with it), or require any global corrections like what you'd do with curves and levels. Maybe slight adjustments from time to time, but not much.

I think this is pretty typical of DSLR's vs. compact cameras for a lot of reasons. I've used some of Nikon's sharpest lenses (80-200 f2.8, 50 f1.4, 85 f1.4) with proper technique on my DSLR, but without any additional USM the images are not razor sharp right out of the camera. I like it this way - I have more control later. Kinda like the whole principal behind shooting raw files.