XE1 Image Softness Reconsidered

I have taken crops from JPEG sample shots on Imaging Resource at ISO 3200, featuring the OMD and the XE1. The first shown below is the shots without adjustment. The OMD is on the left and the XE1 on the right. View the crops at original size and it is clear that the XE1 is softer.

Next I applied sharpening to the XE1 image. I used an unsharp mask with an amount of 90%, radius of 2.5, and threshold of 2. I also boosted saturation slightly (with the slider at 5). This is much more sharpening than I would normally consider, but the sharpening halos were only modest, roughly the same to my eyes as those on the OMD image by default.

At the end of it all, we have two very similar images. My tentative conclusion is that the apparent softness of the XE1 images may be largely a matter of a much lower default level of sharpening.

--

john carson