Cockpit Colin wrote:

Thanks all,

My suspicions were aroused when I took a photo of a stream and surrounding
vegetation whilst on a walking track (hand held) - it just looked plain
blury.

Depending on what active focus point was looking at, the camera might
have misfocused for the scene. IMHO using all seven focus points can be
a trap if one of the outer points happens to be the one chosen by the
camera, and it's looking at an object that is not representative of the
scene distance. For this reason I always have my camera set for the
centre point only.

I went back later on that day and set the camera up on a tripod. On
my 20D with kit lens (zoomed all the way out) At 100 ISO and F29? (or there
abouts - stopped down as far as it would go) I ended up with a exposure of
2.5 sec (not a breath of wind, so not worried about anything moving in the
breeze).

The lens stops down to f/22 at 18mm, and f/38 at the 55mm end - where
you had the lens set - and at that aperture the image will be badly
affected by diffraction, so it will not be anywhere near as sharp as at
f/11 or f/8. Basically, that sort of aperture is unusable for normal
photography.

Back on the PC EVERYTHING just didn't appear to be as sharp as I would have
expected (shot in RAW too). The whole thing just appeared hard on the eyes -
it wasn't until I ran an unsharp mask at 200% over it that it started to
look "normal". Not sure if this is the camera, or if I'm expecting too much.
I did take some photos of some graph paper later on that night, and it "sort
of" appeared OK (difficult to tell).

I could send it in for checking, but it probably means doing without it for
a couple of weeks

Set it up on the tripod - is it a sturdy tripod, or a $30 model that
vibrates like a tuning fork? {:-) - and take a shot of the houses across
the street from your front porch, or similar, at f/8 and again at f/11
using the Av option, at 100 ISO, using the delayed action to fire the
camera, and then have a look at the resultant images. A Canon rep
somewhere advocated using an unsharp mask at 300% and 0.3 pixels, no
threshold. I use this setting, and the images fair leap off the paper at
A4, even with Large Fine jpeg images, though I use RAW for all my
serious stuff.

Regards,

Colin D.