I find that sharpening is required out of digital cameras when you are
not using a really sharp lens.
Yes more megapixels help, but remeber that the sensor isn't film, as
much as they want you to believe it is.

For example: A B&W Example with Colour showing different Sharpening in
Post Processing
http://www.hyperphotocube.com/2008/05/13/bw-photography-i.html
I have blogged about this in the past and most people say the
sharpening is good (and needed).

Yes I think it is still required.
For Example I did a B&W vs. Colour Shot with Sharpening.
http://www.hyperphotocube.com/2008/05/13/bw-photography-i.html
...most people say the sharpening is good (and needed).

No, sharpening is very important even if you don't print you need to sharpen
for other output devices such as other monitors on the web.  It is a very
complex subject and I recommend the late Bruce Frasers book "Real World
Sharpening for CS2" (I think this is the correct title) - anyway look on
Amazon for books by Bruce Fraser.  I found the information in this book to
be excellent.  He recommends a three step sharpening workflow
1 To correct for source blur (ie anti aliass filter in cameras) etc.
2 creative sharpening for the image icontent tself (ie artistic sharpening)
3 output sharpening to counteract the output device blur (ink spread and
dithering on ink jet printers)
Bruces book shows why the oversharpening crunchieness on the monotor ocurrs
and how to control.

regards
       Malcolm

Many P/S compacts apply a lot of sharpening to their images by default.
To a Newbie, the highly sharpened image looks "better".
Ergo, more sales.
If you add additional sharpening to an already sharpened image, you get
some strange artifacts or as you say, "oversharpening".
Some (most?) of the better P/S cameras let the user set the amount of
sharpening. If you don't mind (or enjoy) editing images, I'd recommend
using a lower degree of in-camera sharpening.
If you are really into editing and your camera has the feature, use RAW.
Bob Williams

I guess you're too young to have known about film era sharpening. In
the development of both negatives and prints (or slides) the chemical
diffusion rates, exhaustion rates, and agitation timings were set to
perform edge sharpening by chemical means. So if you want your digital
images to look like good film era prints you will need to apply
sharpening, and it needs to be applied at the specific resolution
chosen for printing or screen viewing.

So with modern digital images you need more kinds of sharpening,
because you have more choices. You need to sharpen at the A5 print
size for the prints you're sending your mother-in-law. You also need
to sharpen seperately at each of the screen sizes you've chosen as the
display options for your screen viewed images.

That's if you want the same kind of sharpening as was applied by the
standard film era chemical development methods.

If you're fussy you may want to explore the very much more
sophisticated sharpening methods available for digital images.

If you have principled objections to sharpening of any kind then I'm
afraid you'll have to wait for pharmacology to some up with some way
of turning off the sharpening done by your retina and brain. The
reason for applying sharpening to camera images is the same as the
reason for applying white balance colour correction: our eyes and
brain process images of things differently from looking at the things
themselves, so trying to make images of things look like the real
things as seen by the naked (but extremely sophisiticated and
resourceful) eye (and brain) will always require quite a bit of
tinkering.

Yes.  When using decent hardware such as the Nikon D3 and Nikkors you find
that images are almost too sharp.  A lot of people aren't used to seeing
sharp images and have a hard time comprehending this wonderful result when
they see it.

Rita

[]

Briefly - it depends what effect you are trying to create, and what the
final display device is.

Cheers,
David

That should have been your first clue. If we were sharpening because of
the image quality coming from the camera, it would be the first step in
the process, not the last.

Lower resolution for web actually seems to require more sharpening than
a picture being prepared for high resolution printing. I would not post
anything more than 800 pixels on a side on the web and I use a
resolution 72 dpi.

Higher resolution does not necessarily mean sharper images. You might
have a little more detail, but detail is not the same thing as sharp.

No. When you edit a picture, you change and lose information. The
effect is to make the image appear softer. You will still need to
sharpen a picture after editing, no matter how sharp the original was.

Sharpening in a computer is not the same as using a sharp lens or
getting a sharp picture in-camera. It does not look the same, either.
What sharpening really does is create a series of blurred layers and
then uses these blurs to cancel out perceived unsharpness. You can use
Gaussian Blur to duplicate anything Unsharp Mask does. That is why it
is called Unsharp Mask, eh? It uses Gaussian blur masks to mask out
anything that is not sharp. But the effect is that sharpening will
always lose some detail in the process.

If you want a truly sharp image, you have to do as little processing as
possible, including sharpening.

My knives still need it from time to time though...

Sorry about my previous flippant comment...

I often use an R72 infrared filter for those photo excursions on still
and bright sunny days when 'normal' photography has problems with harsh
shadows. Infrared often produces slightly 'soft' images with an increase
in noise due to the higher ISO. I usually tweek the sharpening sometimes
even though I risk adding even more noise to make leaf outlines and the
dark tree trunks less soft.