Originally posted by Ira And finally put this argument to rest about how "crappy" the 18-55 is.
Also, why the heck is this in DSLR Discussion?
We haven't even seen a sample of the OP's concerns
and remember he actually said:
Originally posted by Tony3d It's sharp, but not a lot of fine detail.
(my emphasis in
Red)
and it seems to have degenerated to slagging off the 18-55
Originally posted by eddie1960 And infinity being soft on landscapes is notorious even with better lenses than the kit lens, the environmental factors come into play.
Thank you, this is a very important point -
along with our own expectations of being able to see everything in focus, clear and sharp.
Let's take the standardized test shot from the K-7 from Imaging-Resource.com at ISO100,
in fact can we kind of agree that currently the top dogs in the APS-C world are the K-5 and the Nikon D7000?
So let's also take those test shots at the lowest ISO (ie: highest quality) settings -
Here's the overall shot resized for convenience and the area I cropped at 100% shown in the tiny red square....
Here are those 100% crops with NO adjustments (other to brighten the K-5 shot because it was originally dark.)
the test lenses according to the EXIF data which should be attached to the crops (caveat: PhotoBucket can drop metadata) -
for both Pentaxes: smc PENTAX-DA 17-70mm F4 AL [IF] SDM set at 30mm f/8
Nikon: AF-S DX Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G (this is a
prime lens) set at f/8
Those are supposed to be pine needles - they look mushy to me and these are about as optimum and controlled as one can get from the current very top of the heap APS-C dSLRs.
The "fine details" at close to infinity are simply out of the range/resolving power of the sensors and lenses. This is one of the main reasons why classic landscape photographers shoot large format like 10"x8" plate camera which has nearly 60x the area of a full 36x24mm film frame.
I think it may well be overly high expectations.