>Maybe it's me but there seems to be something not quite sharp about many of >these *ist D pictures (also seems to be a fair bit of colour fringing - non APO > lens I guess). I know I'm looking at 96 DPI JPEGS but...
Funny, I was rather surprised at how SHARP a lot of the pictures in this month's PUG looked, although I wasn't singling out *istD pictures. I suspect that I could improve my image handling to produce itsty-bitsy jpegs that looked better on PUG. OTOH, digital is generally held to be less sharp than film, and the *istD appears to be the least sharp DLSR on the block (straight out of the camera, anyway) due to less aggressive in-camera sharpening and the model of sensor used. Some of this may also have to do with the filters in front of the sensor. Nikon's D2h has a thinner filter which allows for higher acutance and thus greater perceived sharpness (although it also apparently fails to block near-IR from the blue channel...). Most if not all non-foveon-sensored DSLRs have an "antialiasing" filter which actually blurs the image deliberately, to compensate for not capturing R,G, and B values in the same spot. If you omit this, you get other faults such as moire and fringing. Digital is usually held to be "smoother" than film, which is in many ways an irreconcilable opposite. Kinda like the difference between developing for high acutance (rodinal) vs minimal grain (microdol). It is also widely remarked on that digital does not handle certain lens abberations as well as film--color fringing being one of the best examples. The post-digital era lens designs seem to do a better job of correcting for the faults that annoy digital sensors, probably at the expense of something else. I don't know how aggressive Pentax has been about using "special" glass to reduce chromatic abberation. Nikon is putting ED glass even in their wide-angles these days whereas nobody used to put special glass in anything much shorter than 180mm--perhaps this is due to digital? DJE
