where does sharpness come from?

The camera body or the lens ??

mostly the lens, usually if the lens is stopped down you get sharper pictures.

Image quality is determined first with the lens then the body.

The Lens forms an image on the sensor (film plane) then the camera records that image.

Both.

And don't forget software sharpening.

Truth be told, the lens is probably more important, and as stated before, the camera only records what the lens sees. But that's only part of the story. There's in-camera sharpening, and post-processing.

Its a secret and if you dont know the handshake you are SOL

Well its nice to know that the lens has something to do with sharpness. I hear alot of people complaining about poor sharpness (mostly for the 40D). I almost thought the 40D was a lemon.

The two main components of sharpness IMO are accurate focus and lens optical quality. Accurate focus is WAY more important IMO. You can have the sharpest lens in the world, but if your system doesn't focus accurately it won't matter.

ps249 wrote in post #5782212
Well its nice to know that the lens has something to do with sharpness. I hear alot of people complaining about poor sharpness (mostly for the 40D). I almost thought the 40D was a lemon.

If you can avoid excessive pixel peeping, most sharpness problems will simply disappear.

pknight wrote in post #5782344
If you can avoid excessive pixel peeping, most sharpness problems will simply disappear.

LOL, how true!

The lense. If you manually focus you will be happy with most lenses. Auto focus of course is required for most things and that is where loss of sharpness occurs... If you stop down to f8 you will be pleased with just about all lenses.

...then there's your shutter speed. Over half the O/F shots shown here are caused by camera shake.

yeah, i reckon a lot of sharpness comes from having a tripod, using mirror lock up and using a remote cable release. it's a pain in the butt to lug around and set up though!

ps249 wrote in post #5782212
Well its nice to know that the lens has something to do with sharpness. I hear alot of people complaining about poor sharpness (mostly for the 40D). I almost thought the 40D was a lemon.

I'm in no way a pro, but I've been shooting for about 5 years now on a semi-pro basis. I just bought a new camera and a new lens about 3 weeks ago. The 40D paired with the sharp Tamron 17-50 2.8. My pictures have never been more sharp straight out of the camera.

pknight wrote in post #5782344
If you can avoid excessive pixel peeping, most sharpness problems will simply disappear.

Could you demonstrate this with crops?