40D soft on the image reviews?

Anyone else have an issue where images reviewed on the lcd look really soft? I got a bit worried that my camera was comming out with soft pictures but when I opened the pictures up on my PC, the pictures were perfectly fine. I still have a week to take my camera back for exchange. What should I do? Dosen't seem to matter which lens i'm using either.

That's completely normal. It's tough to see pictures properly on the LCD depending on the lighting. The new, larger LCD also has the same number of pixels as it's smaller predecessor so I find that things tend to look a bit grainier than before. If you zoom in, its usually possible to tell if the edges are sufficiently sharp.

A number of people comment on this - it's normal (assuming your screen isn't just showing a blurry mess).

I personally don't use the lcd to look for sharpness as I know what AF does. I use the LCD for focus is when using live view at 10x magnification and maybe just to check the focus was where I wanted it to be (but general focus, rather than degrees of sharpness). Otherwise, I might check composition and exposure etc.

What sharpness setting do you have the LCD on, Koalawalla?

koalawalla,
Are you shooting raw with no jpeg?
If so try raw with large jpeg and see if you see a difference in you LCD. I shoot jpeg and the screen looks sharp

Keith R,
There is no setting to adjust the LCD sharpness, you can adjust its brightness though

I've been shooting raw and pretty much all settings are what they were out of the factory. Sharpness is smack in the middle but that should only change the IQ and not the image screen as Keith had said. I just thought about that jpg idea last night too but after the photo shoot. Doh!

I'll take a few snaps today and see what it looks like in jpg. I'd be a tad disappointed if it had issues with softness on the lcd review for raw. I upgraded from an XTi and the images on the lcd from raw were exactly what i'd see on my pc and very sharp. The pixel count was the same as the XT but with larger lcd if I recall correctly so, the 30D/40D situation should be about the same. I'll work on it a bit more later today.

(Btw, live view + 10x mag $#(*&ing rocks!! Makes it so much easier to manual focus on shots with difficult lighting)

It is actually normal on the 40D, and I feel the same way compare to my XTi and 5D.

The 40D and XTi shares the same amount of pixels yet 40D stretch it for another 0.5", which explains the softness.

That being said, it actually does disturb me quite a bit. However, once you see the quality on the screen, you probably would give it a bit of forgiveness.

I’ll admit that, at first, I was more than mildly concerned about it. It’s certainly not “horrible” by any stretch. And, when I look at the images on my computer monitor, well, that truly tells the tale.

Besides, I’m so used to looking at the LCD of the 20D, where something can be tragically out of focus and still look razor sharp!

koalawalla wrote in post #4211078
I've been shooting raw and pretty much all settings are what they were out of the factory. Sharpness is smack in the middle but that should only change the IQ and not the image screen as Keith had said. I just thought about that jpg idea last night too but after the photo shoot. Doh!

If you always shoot RAW only, you can set the in-camera sharpening (in Picture style) to the highest value. That will make the embedded JPG picture which is being displayed on the LCD screen sharper, letting you evaluate achieved focus better.

Works fine for me on the 30D.

Yep, 40D is lacking. I noticed the same thing so I compared it to the Nikon D40.

The D40's (smaller) screen is more useable. It was much sharper and had better colors.

40D's screen was fuzzy with too much saturation. I've also seen blown highlights on the screen that don't blink. Turns out they're not blown in the image, just on the screen. I spend a lot more time looking at the histograms now and not relying on the screen for anything other than checking composition.

So far the big screen on the 40D has been a disappointment for viewing pics, but a great thing for the menus.

- Keith -

If you're shooting RAW, the reason that it appears that you're blowing highlights upon review with the LCD is that the "thumbnail" that the camera puts up for review on the LCD is a JPEG. Because of the sigmoidal shape of the JPEG tone curve (which is designed to mimic the tonal response of the human eye to luminance) it can appear that you are blowing highlights (upon review) when you are not. This is because JPEG compresses about a third of the highlight information to fit into it's tone curve. This compression thus gives impression that you're blowing the highlight upon camera LCD reivew, which as you pointed out, turns out not to be case when you review the actual image in your RAW convertor. This is what is so nice about shooting RAW compared to JPEG, is that you still have all the highlight detail you can "pull back" if need be. With JPEG, you're basically throwing away all that data.

I have had the same feeling but only with the photos taken in a wood two weekends ago. It looks for me like the rendering of non-lineal objects or small irregular objects is not correct. For example, the leaves of the beeches didn´t looked fine, mainly OOF in the LCD screen. But later on at home, they were fine in my computer.

I think something similar did happened with de Mk III at the beginig, and they fixed in a posterior firmware update ...

So may be is time to rise our voices in order to Canon can listen to us ...., please

John_B wrote in post #4210685
Keith R,
There is no setting to adjust the LCD sharpness, you can adjust its brightness though

Blast! That'll teach me for writing from memory, in a hurry, from work!

[QUOTE=Keith R;4214265]Blast! That'll teach me for writing from memory, in a hurry, from work!

Keith -

You were righter than you think. As pointed out by agedbriar above, if you adjust the sharpness in the Picture Style you choose to +7, and shoot RAW only, the LCD will show the embedded LCD as much sharper, thereby helping you check focus.

Bob N.

agedbriar wrote in post #4211540
If you always shoot RAW only, you can set the in-camera sharpening (in Picture style) to the highest value. That will make the embedded JPG picture which is being displayed on the LCD screen sharper, letting you evaluate achieved focus better.

Bingo, we have a winner!