Lens is no good, or was it me?

[a_scayola]

Hi everyone,
Lens in question is a Canon EF 35-80 3.5. It IS a very basic lens (it was a freebie after all) , but I was still wondering if this picture represents the best I can get from it. I'm not sure if what I see is lack of sharpness or if it's out of focus, or something else that was my fault. OR.. maybe I'm just hoping too much?

The following picture was taken at f/6.7 and 1/500 with my new (to me) Canon 10D .



And this is a crop:



What do you guys think?

Andres

 

[LaFoto]

The second is a crop of that tiny corner of the first?
Well, I guess you cannot expect more here. The photo as such looks as in focus as can be.
As a user of very, very, VERY basic lenses myself, I have so far not pampered myself with anything better and if I were to crop such a tiny corner out of such large original, I would not see any better results, either, I think....

But let's see what our real experts say. I am not one of those.

 

[Big Mike]

The sharpness looks OK to me. You can't expect it to be extremely sharp when you look at it that close. If you enlarged a 35mm film shot to a 20x30 you might notice the same sort of thing. (few people did that, therefore lens quality was not questioned so much back when film was king).

Granted, a pro quality lens probably would have provided a sharper image...but I don't think you would have a problem making a fairly large print from the original image.

Have you applied any sharpening to the image in Photoshop etc? Was is shot in RAW or JPEG?

 

[a_scayola]

Thanks for responding guys,
The image was shot in RAW, I resized it to 1024x? and saved it as a JPEG. No sharpening or any other editing was done.

 

[rp1600]

Okay, by far not a digital expert here, but did you shoot it in auto mode? I ran into this same problem with many of my shots. In the end I found out that the camera was picking up too slow a shutter speed to prevent blur from camera shake. Not sure if that's the case here since it appears to be well lit but in several of my shots the scene was very well lit. Wasn't until I started doing tests wtih manual, shutter priority and aperature priority that ir ealized the problem wasn't in the lens or focus, but in the way the camera was reading the lighting.

 

[thebeginning]

i wouldnt worry about it, that's a fine amount of sharpness for that lens. Also, the crop in question was taken from the absolute corner of the photo, which typically is the area of the lens that performs the worst. nice shot btw

 

[Big Mike]

Okay, by far not a digital expert here, but did you shoot it in auto mode? I ran into this same problem with many of my shots. In the end I found out that the camera was picking up too slow a shutter speed to prevent blur from camera shake. Not sure if that's the case here since it appears to be well lit but in several of my shots the scene was very well lit. Wasn't until I started doing tests wtih manual, shutter priority and aperature priority that ir ealized the problem wasn't in the lens or focus, but in the way the camera was reading the lighting.

They said the shutter speed was 1/500 which should be plenty fast for most situations.

 

[a_scayola]

Thanks for the replies guys. I was inclined to believe the same as most of you guys, that that's as sharp as I'll get for that lens, but since this is my first time with a Digital SLR I thought I'd ask before starting to dream of L lenses that I can't afford

Thanks again everyone. Loving this forum.
Andres