CCD Burn in

Ok, When i first got my new 40D in February of this year i took some shots with it and was blown away with the image quality. But recently i have not been happy with my images so i dug out one of the first images i took when i first opened the box.

Please tell me why the image http://davesimages.hob​by-site.com/IMG_0427.JPG is not has sharp has this image http://davesimages.hob​by-site.com/IMG_0005.JPG

Image IMG_0005.JPG is the 5th shot i took from new, And IMG_0427.JPG is recent. the exif data looks the same on both. shot in manual.
I can upload more recent images if you want to check them out for me.

So is a CCD Processor the same has a PC Processor.

Cheers.

40D uses a CMOS sensor, not a CCD if that makes any difference. Aside from that, your flash seem to be more directly pointed at your dog on the 5th shot compared to your 427. Have you changed the FEC by any chance?

It might also be just a slight mis-focus on the newer shot. Have you tried retaking it to check?

Sorry i meant CMOS.

I don't think i have i do know that i reset the camera settings just in case but that was the image i got.

Can you tell me what you mean by FEC.

also And i was wondering if Canon had changed some of the settings but i think when you change to auto all the settings change to the auto default.

Well, my 20D has done around 80,000 shots and is just as sharp now as when I bought it, so you shouldn't be seeing a difference after a few hundred unless the camera has been damaged.

To be honest, you can't directly compare just two images and come up with any meaningful answer. When shooting animals I will often shoot a sequence and the sharpness will vary slightly between images, for a number of reasons.

Are ALL your shots coming out as soft as that, now ?

I would hazard a guess that those two you show may be largely lit by ambient light. I know you used a flash but there isn't the sort of hard-edged shadows I would expect from that. Of course, you may have bounced the flash or used a softbox in which case ignore this.

If the ambient was brighter than the flash, and the flash was merely 'fill-in' (through being too low on manual, or by having FEC set to reduce the power) then the shutter speed of 1/60 was too slow and would leave you prone to camera shake. You may have been lucky on the first one, but moved slightly on the later shot.

Alternatively, you could have locked focus, then rocked backwards / forwards slightly making the image a little soft due to misfocusing.

There are numerous reasons that could be behind a soft result, if you are getting nothing sharp then there may be a problem. However if some shots are sharp, some soft, then it is probably user error. I don't mean that as a criticism, we all get some soft shots.

Try the camera outside where you can get a good shutter speed and stop the aperture down a couple of stops, to minimse the effect of slight misfocusing, then take a number of shots. If these are all soft, you may well have a problem with the camera, if most / all are sharp then it comes down to an error of some sort on that shot of the dog.

Oh, and stick to just the central focus point and don't focus recompose. Stick the point over the subject and take the shot.

One other thought. Did you use an IS lens? If you don't give it time to spin up to speed it can cause that sort of an issue. You need to hold the shutter button half way down, long enough to let it stabilise, before pressing it all the way.

If you look closely at the dogs tag two thing pop out. First, it looks as if in the newer pic has sharpness set lower than in the first pic. The fist one almost looks over sharpened. Second, the newer pic clearly has less noise than the first indicating that possible noise reduction is turned on more aggressively. The two together can lead to what you are seeing.

Both images 0427 and 0005 were took on auto so i would have thought that they would be the same
my Kit Is 40D+17-85 IS
this i took yesterday. http://davesimages.hob​by-site.com/IMG_0439.JPG

Does this look ok to you.

The first one just looks over sharpened to me. You can probably get the same effect in the second by turning up the sharpness in post processing (on your computer).

I think your camera is just fine.

Dave,
The two photos of the dog were taken with your 17-85 lens, at f/5.6, 1/60th sec at 76mm and 80mm. Neither looked to be in focus to me, or it may have been a little camera shake, or perhaps some of both out of focus plus camera shake.

The photo from yesterday was taken at f/6.3, 1/500th sec at 29mm with a 16-35 L lens. The combination of high shutter speed ( 1/500th), lens stopped down a little more, shorter focal length and a better quality lens resulted in a sharper photo.

My guess, just from those three shots is there is nothing wrong with your camera.

An aside: you might want to learn to "resize and save for web" when you are posting photos up to your website. There ( generally ) is no advantage to posting up files that are huge ( that last one was over 4 meg ). For viewing on a monitor in a browser, you could get that size down to 150 to 200K, and it would look the same to the folks viewing, and it would download almost instantly.

george m w,

Sorry about the size of the images, I just drop them into my folder and are instantly available to the web, I do have a family and friends forum of my own but i was told by this forum to remove the link so the only other way to get my images here are from that davesimages link.

I thought if the images was the original you could see what the camera was actually producing.

does the image quality change after resizing, Also could you point me to a tutorial in resizing for web if you know of one.

Cheers,
Eyesociety

george m w wrote in post #7714639
Dave,
The two photos of the dog were taken with your 17-85 lens, at f/5.6, 1/60th sec at 76mm and 80mm. Neither looked to be in focus to me, or it may have been a little camera shake, or perhaps some of both out of focus plus camera shake.

My guess, just from those three shots is there is nothing wrong with your camera.

The second looked in focus to me at the dogtag and face of the dog and that seems to me why one is sharper than the other. Your camera can autofocus with a good deal of accuracy but it'll never be 100% and, if you focused and then moved a bit for whatever reason its quite possible the focus was off because of that.

Dave,
Do you use photoshop? If so, resizing and saving for web is simple:

File
automate, fit image ( plug in whatever maximum size you want to constrain it. I typically use 800 x 800 )
Save for web. Chose a quality level that will result in a file size of appxox 150Kb -200kb.
Resizing and saving for web does affect the quality, however, the question becomes, can your 'customer' see the difference when looking at your photos on their computer in a browser. The answer to that is: probably not, unless you get really crazy and do a save for web that is very low quality.
If you google "resize and save for web" you'll get plenty of hits for tutorials.

Cheers george m w,

That info is was really helpful.

Thanks Again,

Dave

Have to agree with most, this is actually user error.

On a side note, the "burn-in" for processors for computers was mainly solved, and there really isn't much difference between a brand new one and one that's been used for a few weeks. Variability in processors do exist though, so some chips you can really clock and others just don't seem to want to go any faster, though that again seems to be less of an issue with the new i7 chips (just simply godly for everything from photos to transcoding to gaming, even those ridiculous 2.66 to 4.2 gh overclocks on stock fans)

Took a trip to Baslow Edge today and took some images,
Please give opinions or advice on images, taken with the 17-85 IS and 70-300 IS.

http://davesimages.hob​by-site.com/