So? Cropping does not alter their quality.
I beg to differ. The eye can be fooled into imagining missing details when looking at a distant object. I own both the original iPad and the iPad Air 2 (Retina), and even though their screens are the same size, I do notice a marked difference in sharpness.
The 70d and 100-400 II can easily get you award winning shots. I have very little patience. I hike and shoot most of the time and I don't typically do it in city parks where the birds are used to humans.
I use a 7d and 100-400 v1. My setup is actually inferior to yours and I have cover shots with it, I can crop nearly 100% and retain great details if I do my job correctly.
Long lenses require technique that most short lens shooters aren't used to yet.
Bump your shorter speed to 1/640th and set the aperture to 6.3 or 7.1 If you really want sharp. Float the ISO up to 800 or 1000 of needed.
You can check my Flickr site for shots I've done with my old 100-400. Almost every shot in there is with the thing and a 7d or 60d.
Just give yourself a few weeks to get used to the lens. It's really not very heavy either. I hike 8-10 miles at a time with mine no problem.
I use a Cotton Carrier, which works great with this lens. I hardly know it (the lens) is there, and feel almost no strain on my shoulders after a few hours of walking around.
Perhaps it's a matter of perception (and the resolution/dot pitch of one's computer monitor), but anything over ISO 400 on my 70D looks dreadful. Yes, I know how to get rid of the noise in LR, but the cure (loss of texture) is often worse than the disease. It's like taking a pimply face and covering it with a quarter inch of makeup!
I spent some time looking at you Flickr stream. While I like many of the shots for their color, composition, action, I find it hard to judge the sharpness at the resolution they are presented (roughly 900x600 pixels). To me sharp means I can blow it up to 24"x18" (i.e., ~ 100% crop), stand 3 feet away from it and not perceive any softness in the image where it matters.
Yeah, my comment may have come off more rude than i wanted to...but I look at sample images, and see tons of great shots with all kinds of lenses, it's not just walking around and pointing the camera at a bird, and taking the shot...it's all the preparation, ability to get close, to wait, all kinds of factors...the good thing is when i see other shots that are great with the gear i have, i know it's not the gear that's holding me back, so no need to think of upgrading
So you do admit that you indented your comment to be just a teeny weeny bit rude? Anyway, time to step back. I really shouldn't be complaining. I'm blessed to be able to own the gear I have and use it for a hobby. I've only been shooting DSLRs for 5 years, and I've improved tremendously in that time. I'm sure I will get better at handling this lens, and by this time next year will have gotten one or two shots worthy of printing at 24"x18" to hang somewhere around my house
