Perhaps I was a little brash with the thread title by using "better", maybe it would have been better to add suited after the word hehe
There's only so much you can distinguish on a resized/resampled image! I'll post a better 100% crop when home
is the 2.8 really so soft that it becomes a problem or is it just pixel peeping that makes it noticably soft?
You might remember my Duck shots from the 1st day of owning the 2.8 IS, those were the sharpest results I got, very clean and crisp but after the first day I could not get consistent sharp results below F4 even after changing from 350D to 40D and having the lens swapped for another one (though from the same store, only had a stock of 2 as well ). Either way for printing and weddings this inconsistent sharpness streak wasn't suitable for large prints and the weight was not suitable for events that last several hours carrying it around!
Perhaps the store I used had a soft batch but it defo was not "me" that was the problem because my shooting has not changed going from the 2.8 to 4 and I'm getting consistent sharpness throughout shots now compared to before.
Also as already mentioned the 4 has less flaring at F4 and less CA.
1 keeper in 6.. I rated you so much highly than that
Are you sure you weren't just expecting too much? Sharpness doesn't just depend on aperture, it also depends on the subject distance. If you take a photo of something 1ft away at f/2.8 its going to look extremely sharp compared to if you took a photo of the same object at 10ft away. Obviously this would be far most apparent at f/2.8 than f/4.
Well for £1200 My expectations were very high I will admit, I expected excellent results through and through and on the whole yes they were technically sharp but let down by flaring which meant shadow objects in a highlight surrounding looked "soft" due to the flaring around the edges giving a soft look to the image which went away At around F5. The F4 IS has none of the flaring problems which is why it looks sharper at that Av!
That'll be due to f/4 as well I guess.