G/R...I haven't discovered the "sharpening" adjustment, yet. I did set an
internal pic "setting" to "landscape", which supposedly offers the sharper
setting(s), and they look ok, but not the razor stuff I even got with my
cheapazz old KM. So far shooting at Iso 100, medium f stop, not racked out or in,
to extreme zoom focal lenghts. I don't have PS...

Not done fiddling or, shooting/evaluating yet, but so far, as Peggy Lee said,
"Is that all there is?"

For best results, these cameras need to be shot at full manual (for most of the shots). let's see some sample pics.

On my 50D (should be the same on the 40D) you can manually adjust sharpness by going to picture style (IE standard/landscape/portrait.. etc) and then press Info to further adjust sharpness.

Having said that - alot of my pictures do have a hint of softness - so far though I have just attributed that to not knowing the camera and lenses fully. Some of the pics though turn out razor sharp so it is definatly my fumbling that is the cause :)

-Gresch, I found that alt menu in my handy dandy manual...I'm woikin' on it,
to see what effect it has. We are fogged/misted in up here. It may be a day
or so.
-MiCkEy: I shoot 95% of my stuff, (for the past dozen years), on AV or
Manual. Some initial pics are coming...
-Ravenheart: don't give up. I won't either, but am surprised it comes so soft
outta the box, or on the landscape (sharper) setting. Who in the hell spends
this kind of dough for romantic/softer edged stuff than my 6 yr old Canon S50
pocket cam gives.

Being somewhat facetious, though somewhat underwhelmed, thus far.
BR,mD

All DSLR's produce soft pics on purpose. It's by design so that you can process them any way you like after you've taken the pic. The logic being that if it's done in camera, you can't "undo it". On P&S cameras, the sharpening and saturation is cranked way up, so all pics come straight out of the camera very sharp and over saturated, and people have become accustomed to it.

Softness and low saturation are the 2 most common "complaints" of new DSLR owners. I was the same way when I bought my 10D, but a quick tutorial on unsharp mask in PS and a little "levels" and "curves" in PS and I was good to go. It also has to do with allowing you to adjust the settings to optimize the pics for printing on whichever photo printer you have, as they're all different.

one other thing, you can buy photoshop elements for under $100 instead of buying the full blown app, and it will allow you to sharpen and saturate the pics to your personal likes.

The 40 and 50 also allow you to maximize both in the camera settings, you might want to check that out as well. But remember, once you take the pic in JPEG format with the settings cranked, you can't undo them.

Hope this helps...

Did a few shots with sharpness set to max (7) - these are two different lenses - the first picture being a fast standard zoom and the second picture being a telephoto zoom. Both are cropped, not resized. I'd be curious to see if these are considered soft?

raven - can you post the EXIF data? The 2nd pic in particular looks OOF, and i'm thinking it's motion blur not softness. It's also tough to see what point the camera picked up the focus. you have a few objects in the pic, foreground and background, and they're far away from each other, so getting everything in focus is almost impossible. Also, if you used a slow shutter and low aperture (2.8?) the DOF will be very shallow, resulting in OOF areas, i.e. the bokeh will be big.

First picture is f/5.6 - the second at f/7.1 - both pictures were taken at 1/320

OOF and Motion blur could explain it - the treeline is about 100 yards away.

You can adjust the sharpness and saturation using the DPP software that came with your camera if you shoot in RAW. Sharpening and saturation are applied in-camera to generate the JPG files. As such, some information is altered/lost in the process that cannot be recovered from the JPG file. The higher settings, the more you alter/loose. If you apply sharpening and saturation during post processing then you have complete control and can apply as much or as little as appropriate on a per picture basis.

Comparing P&S vs DLSR setting for sharpness and saturation is analogous to comparing TV settings from the showroom vs settings after a proper calibration. Most people complain that a calibrated TV looks soft, dim and under-saturated because they got use to the eyeball searing settings out of the box.

I think the point was that if you have a friend or relative that is a Costco member, they can buy it online and have it shipped to you directly.

I buy stuff for my Mom online at Costco and have it shipped directly to her instead of me. She then mails me a check. Now if she needs to return something to Costco for any reason, that may become an issue but so far hasn't needed to.