problematic 17-40 L ?? or weak sensor?

So ive started to notice that a lot of details in wide angle shots, are very smeary.. almost as if, the pixels are blending into each other. Kinda looks like that i had ran the PS "smart blur" filter on them. Below are 100% crop of some leafs, I think you can see what I'm talking about. Do I have a bad lens? or is just what I can expect out of the resolving capability of the D30 sensor?

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If these are edge details then that is reasonable with the D30. If thats center crop (which I highly doubt) then thats a bad lens.

Thanks, what would be the significance of it being the center crop? With the 1.6x crop factor, we're already limited to mostly the "center" of the lens. There shouldn't too much difference between edge and center crop.