More on camera sharpening

A couple of weeks ago I posted a couple of pictures taken with my EOS400D with and without in camera sharpening.  Now that I have my shiny new compact camera I thought I would look at the sharpening.  The compact has less of a range of sharpening levels available, so I tried most sharp, standard sharp and least sharp in that order – I took the pictures in not so good light indoors.  (I would like to claim it was because I wanted to test the sharpening in low light conditions, but, in truth, it was where I happened to think of it).  A crop of the pictures is shown below:

As you can see there is a substantial difference in the quality of the photo with the standard sharpening (in the middle) proving to be the better of the three.

The sharpened version seems to be the worst, suffering from the low light making the picture noisier.  (I set the camera on automatic (and macro) and let it choose its own settings.  Interestingly it chose a slightly higher ISO setting for the standard photo.)