Why the blur?

[Sw1tchFX]

Thanks alot for the comments Derrel.. I guess I should of said I am looking for a zoom lens that will give me better results then the current lens I already have.. or if i was doing something wrong with the lense...

I just snapped this shot off, the details are below as you can see even with the ISO of 100 its still pretty noisy.. I think i have a friend that has the higher quality version of this lens (with the IS and USM) ill have to see if i can borrow it to see if it has the same results..... Everyone else i know uses Nikon

1/320
ISO 100
f5.6

Now that's just out of focus+motion blur becuase you're only shooting 1/320th at 300mm.



I tell you what, You know how you can rule out that it's not the lens?

Put your camera on your sturdy tripod, manually focus on a subject, shoot at f/8, a lower ISO, and use the self timer release. If you do all that correctly, the picture oughta cut glass it's so sharp.

 

[robertwsimpson]

who looks like Rob Lowe?

 

[UUilliam]

1. ISO Causes noise, not the lens
2. ISO 100 will have no evident noise (or less atleast) compared to 1600
3. that lens is fine, also your using a 1.6x crop sensor i am assuming, what I find helps with soft edges in this case is: (buy the following programs i list, i think they do trials to try them first...)
NoiseNinja - Reduce the noise (it has auto profiling so just fire it up then hit okay and it should remove the majority of noise (but not it all obvs...)
Adobe photoshop - Unsharp mask (search youtube how to use unsharp mask.)
Adobe photoshop - Resize image (I use a calculator and take your long side and divide it by 1.6, but i more often just change my images to about 1080 on the longside or 800 for web)
unsharp mask again (if necessary)
that should create a sharper cleaner image.
also the smaller you make the image, the less evident noise

No image (unless it is totally steady using mirror lockup, flash, tripod etc..) will be 100% tack sharp at full size without any editing.

Also your image is over exposed so ISO 800 would have worked well.

The problems you are experiencing are due to user error tbh
Its a bit like if a chef buys a new spatula and burns all his burgers, it isn't the spatulas fault, it is user error.
I use that lens, and get fairly decent results,

Try reading up on Signal To Noise Ratio (in short, Bright scenes = low noise, Dark scene = high noise.)