I think all the comments about white balance and saturation, while true, are something of a red herring.

Gross manufacturing errors aside, there are only three causes of blur. Lack of focus (or lack of depth of field), subject movement, or camera movement.

With the bins, if it was the first, something would be sharp, and it isn't. The bins presumably aren't moving.

So either, the lens has got plastic elements nicked from a toy camera and glued together with Copydex, or it's camera shake.

Any lens test needs to eliminate two out of three every time, and look carefully for the third.

I'm not saying G01 is wrong - I'm just saying that the photos we've seen don't show anything conclusive.

The first one seems to be just slightly - just slightly, mind you - over processed to me, but the rest are delightful.

I've been trying to photograph birds a little since getting the Bigma, but without much result, other than to educate me in how hard it is to get them sharp, natural, and well-exposed all at once.

Which these very much are.

I used to feel foolish when I made mistakes like this. Now I just feel relieved that the problem is just me being a muppet. It's invariably a lot easier and cheaper to fix than if the problem I imagined was real.

Hope you can get the focusing/zooming sorted out though.

Is that without any noise reduction at all, or after NR?

I'm afraid not. With the price of the Pentax 540 as it is, I'd need a lottery win to give up either of them.

I quite often use them both together, as it happens if I'm taking pictures at parties or similar. I stick them on their stands, pointing up (if the ceiling is a suitable colour and not too high), on either side of the room, and then fire them wirelessly as slaves.

That paragraph is really only saying that cameras find it harder to AF when the light is low, and of course that's true.

It's a bit different from the point under discussion here, where the camera acquires an AF lock very easily, it's just not focused where it thinks it is.

It's the SEF-54PZF - I have two.

Identical to the AF540FGZ apart from the badge - and the manual, which is a cut-down and much less useful version of the Pentax one.

I'd put it the other way round, myself.

And the Canon image is way noisier.

Up to Picasa 3.8, it did this with K-5 DNGs.

If you upgrade to 3.9, they appear to have fixed it.

I mentioned this a couple of days ago

A portrait was just an example. So what if the picture doesn't meet some arbitrary aesthetic standard of lighting and composition!!

Seriously, you're not really suggesting that it's unreasonable to take a picture at 1/80 at ISO 400, at quite short range, and expect that the camera focuses where it's supposed to (and claims to), rather than an inch or more in front?