You could always service it yourself..?

Come on! You knew that was always going to be my suggestion.

Me too!

It probably is for most folk with less shaky hands than mine, but checking for this critical level of sharpness isn't generally possible in the field. Hence if this is a once-in-a-lifetime sort of shot it's worth having the reassurance that only a really sturdy tripod can give.

Don't get disheartened by a few early disappointments - most of the people who successfully sell stock images have spent years getting to know their equipment intimately and even then only expect a relatively low proportion of their shots to be accepted. You've made a good start, (hopefully) learnt a couple of lessons and now it's time to put your new-found knowledge to the test - keep refining and you'll get there eventually.

Good luck and if you fancy forwarding me a commission from future sales...

I must be going blind in my old age - or the price of the GR-D just stunned me...

I think Vista is a massive improvement over XP.

I build / repair PCs for customers from time-to-time (only as a sideline so maybe 4/5 machines a year) and have been doing so since around the time Windows 95 came out.

In my experience I've had (read: my customers have had) far fewer problems with Vista enabled PCs than I ever experienced with previous versions of Windows. I actually skipped XP altogether for my own PC (went from 98SE to Vista 64bit) as I truly believed XP to be the spawn of Satan...

People complain that Vista is memory hungry but then *every* new OS places significantly higher demands on hardware (including memory) than the one it replaces. The moral of the story is that unless you're prepared to upgrade your hardware then stick with the OS you've got - if you want the latest OS then be prepared for a full overhaul to make it run properly.

Just my $0.02

Can't see it on there so looks like someone's already snapped it up...

I notice there's a Ricoh GR Digital on there for £199 though - I've got one that's on semi-permanent loan to my Dad but it's a great little pocket camera if you don't mind the fixed 28mm (equiv) lens. Twin control wheels, f2.4 lens and RAW shooting in a tiny package - highly recommended!

Welcome Dave, whichever package you end up with I'm sure you'll be very pleased - just be prepared to lust after more and more lenses as time goes by...

I concur.

Nail. Head. Hit on.

Why warn about it? If you look at the first shot you posted it looks acceptably sharp and at that size it's reasonably typical of an average size print at a normal viewing distance. This is, after all, what 99% of photographers are looking to achieve.

The softness that you see is only there when you view at 100% - unless you're printing at poster sizes (or selling to stock agencies) then these levels of "softness" are really irrelevant. As you are looking to sell stock then you either need to work within the limits of your equipment or invest in something more suitable.

As a rule of thumb, APS-C DSLR's are sharpest around f5.6, 35mm (and FF DSLR's) around f8, Medium Format around f11-f16 and Large Format around f22-f32.

If you took exactly the same shots (same field of view) with each format at its "sharpest" aperture you'd see that the DoF remains almost exactly the same in each case. It sounds like the stuff you've been reading was written by folks with 5x4 cameras so you'll need to take everything with a liberal dose of salt and do some sums to convert their figures to ones suitable to your equipment.

As Kris pointed out above, f5.6 at 12mm on a DSLR will give you a near-infinite DoF so there's no advantage to be had in going any smaller (unless you can afford a much bigger camera).