Camera Labs

Bought a Nikon Coolpix P100. Satisfied so far... I looked at a lot of camera reviews for both P7S and DSLRs. One day I will own a DSLR. My first photos indoors with my P100 I was very disappointed with the image quality. Noise and blurry photos in all modes Auot, A, S, M, P. I lloked at some samples on the net of "Full" size images and noticed that it didn;t matter what grade of camera it came from, when viewing the images at 100% none of the images from any camera were clean and sharp. I am trying to understand why. I find images on the net that are huge in size and are tack sharp and clear. HOW? I hope that I have asked this question in a manner that someone will understand and help me get the answer I am looking for. Why can't images come out tack sharp from a camera when viewing at 100% on your computer screen?

The biggest factor into that is:
Lens, Iso, and Noise Reduction.

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Hi Ghost1951,

first of all, a warm welcome to the forum!

Sharpness in images come from a great many factors:
- contrast in the image
- shutter-speed and subject movement
- Aperture (which determines depth-of-field and thus, sharpness)
- iso-settings (vis a vis noise)
- technique
- lens
- sensor and processor in the camera
- post processing

A computer monitor has about 100 PPI. When you look at a 10MP image @ 100%, it's almost equivalent to looking at movie-poster with your nose touching it. (slight exaggeration here, but not completely off). They will often look less-than-tack sharp at that range - conversely all your images probably look sharp on the LCD on your camera.

To really answer your question specifically, we would have to look at your images and all the settings/EXIF data captured with it.

Under good daylight circumstances, you can usually get acceptable sharpness if you have good technique and the right settings. But as soon as you have less-than ideal light and less-than-ideal settings and technique, it's very very easy to not get that "best possible sharpness" that your camera and lens can deliver.

Cheers

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Nikon stuff and other stuff, but not nearly as much stuff as I really want!

It's a pretty complex question. Pixel peeping at 100% on computer screens I think has made some folks extremely worried, or worse, extremely fussy about their image quality.

Like others have said, there are so many factors that go into making pictures sharp: ISO, ideal focusing, post-processing, lens optics, etc. etc. I would just recommend that you look at things at print size or display size and see if things work for you there to start, then you can refine your techniques to improve on this. Pretty much every DSLR is capable of taking very good, sharp images. People like to bicker about softness on this lens, or the aggressive processing from this body, etc. They're all quite good at getting results if you practice a lot with attaining proper focus, and exposing well. I would say proper exposure is probably the most fundamental and sometimes trickiest things to do to make images pop and look sharp (or blurry in some cases ).

Thank you for all your input. It will take me time to sort through it and understand it. I will check all likns provided and would appreciate any and all links to examples and tuts the ya'll can help me with. Again, thank you very much.