Soft Images, STD

[BillBass]

Most of the images on my three week old S2 are soft. After many tests using both manual and auto focus most of the images are still soft right at the point of focus. When I took this shot of the two athletes using a 70-200VR (ISO100, 1/500 at f4) I focused carefully on the eyes and then re-composed.
The guy at B&H suggested trying again with the Sharpness set on HARD. But should the images not be sharp enough when set at STD (default setting) ?
:confused:

[lightwrangler]

Is the photo sharp anywhere? Why I ask is that it is possible that when you recomposed, the focus changed. Sometimes with some lenses when you zoom in and focus, hold the focus lock and then zoom back out again the lens is no longer in focus. The zoom range affects the focus of the lens. I don't know if this is true for the 70-200 VR you are using. But if it is, unless the focus point moved to infront of any visable subject then something behind might be sharp.

Shutter speed. While 1/500 is fast, at 200mm it is completely possible that you can encounter camera shake even at that speed. Check the camera and lens on a tripod at different focal lengths and different subject distances.

I find in the end all of my S2 images need to be unsharp masked in Photoshop. Not a lot, but it does bring them up quite nicely. Try a RAW file shot and compare the difference. Do a search on this site re: sharpness issues and you'll see that most of us do use USM. I have read that Fuji intentionally has made this chip "soft" after complaints that the S1 was "too sharp". I don't know how true that is.

At this point, what you need to do is decide if this is a user, lens or camera issue and then you can proceed with a fix.

[BillBass]

Thank you Lightwrangler for posting a reply.. You are right about the camera shake even at 1/500. There can always be a few handheld images that are not sharp because of camera shake. But usually with film, when looking through a loop, a sharp image really does look sharp. There is something to do with sharpness that is different with these digital images and it seems like you really do have to hold the camera steady.

Today I had time to spend a few hours doing some test shots again. I took the B&H guy`s advice and set the Sharpness on HARD instead of STD. The camera was on a tripod most of the time and I tried shooting the same scenes at f4, f8, f16. The images definitely look sharper (for) now, even at f4.

There is all ready a thread discussing sharpness so it might be best to join in there. I will post an image there if you would like to have a look.

Bill
:)