need to sharpen

I always find that I need to sharpen my photos in photoshop and never get a tack on sharp focus (always just a little bit soft) when using my Canon EOS 20d. When I use my little Sony cybershot, the photos seem to be more sharp right out of the camera. Is there something wrong here? This is using AF centerpoint.

Digital SLRs tend to be fairly conservative on in-camera sharpening, leaving the user to apply whatever sharpening they feel is necessary as part of the overall creative process. Digital compacts tend to apply sometimes quite aggressive sharpening, more in tune with the "point and shoot" ethos.

The inherent softness of your 20D isn't a fault - it's a combination of various things, mainly the Bayer pattern of the sensor and the anti-alias filter (which works to eliminate moire and aliasing problems at the cost of some softness). However, there's a difference between your pictures being soft (lack of micro-contrast at the edges) and out of focus. If your pictures are out of focus, it's possible that you have a focussing error that requires one or more items from your kit to be calibrated.

Posting samples (particularly 100% crop samples) would help. If you're giong to do this, a good lens to choose would be your EF 50mm f/1.4, which is regarded as a sharp lens, particularly when stopped down a little.

David

When I sharpen, the photos sharpen up real nice, which leads me to believe it is not a focus problem. I will try to post some photos later. Thanks

Read pages 4, 25-26 and 30-31 of the following PDF file for a good overview as to why your images can benefit from sharpening during post-processing for a Canon DSLR. The graphic on page 26 can be very informative for some people:

http://www.photoworksh​op.com/canon/EOS_Digit​al.pdf