"soft images" from Nikon D200?

In reading over all the reviews I have found, I am leaning toward the D200, both because of its overall quality as well as its ruggedness (I will spend 5 months doing fieldwork with it). However, one of the reviewers (imaging-resource.com) writes: "Strong anti-aliasing filter and very conservative in-camera sharpening makes for soft images." Because image sharpness is important in the work I will be doing, can anyone help explain this? Is it something I can compensate for in pre-shot settings. In short, is this a major drawback for the camera with respect to image quality?

Any thoughts will be much appreciated.

The best way I know of to explain anti-aliasing is by example. Look at the following two circles:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e3...r/Circles1.jpg

The only difference in the way that the two circles was created is that the one one the left is not anti-aliased, and the onw on the right is. Notice that the left circle seems more jagged and pixelated.

How this can affect image quality becomes more apparent when we increase the magnification of these same circles to 300%:

http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e3...r/Circles2.jpg

So anti-aliasing blends the high-contrast edges of an image to make them appear smoother.

Weak in-camera sharpening is not neccessarily a liability, as many photographers prefer to do their sharpening in post-processing. If you plan on doing some post-processing to your images, this camera should work fine.

- Joe U.

Medley, thanx for the great reply!. You made the issue quite easy to comprehend.

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Originally Posted by ramdas

In reading over all the reviews I have found, I am leaning toward the D200, both because of its overall quality as well as its ruggedness (I will spend 5 months doing fieldwork with it). However, one of the reviewers (imaging-resource.com) writes: "Strong anti-aliasing filter and very conservative in-camera sharpening makes for soft images." Because image sharpness is important in the work I will be doing, can anyone help explain this? Is it something I can compensate for in pre-shot settings. In short, is this a major drawback for the camera with respect to image quality?

Any thoughts will be much appreciated.

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I find that if I use my Pro f2.8 zoom lenses then the results with default camera settings look fine. If I use my prosumer 18-70 or 18-200 lenses then the result is a little soft so I set saturation and sharpening to medium-high.

I always shoot RAW+JPG so I can change the values afterwards. Occasionally I give people the JPG's straight out of the camera so it's useful to have them looking more or less right.