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Hi, I'm flummoxed and am looking for an answer. I've recently been attempting to shoot some studio self portraits and am using an A3000 with either the 18-55 or 55-300 lenses. I've got it tied to a single 400ws monolite studio strobe and have tried connecting with both a wired and wireless trip system. I'm producing enough light to have my settings at 1/80 and f22 in the Manual mode. In all cases I've got the camera on a tripod and using the 10 second self timer to shoot the images. My image settings are Fine/RAW and I've tried every AF mode setting available. All of my pictures are coming out extremely soft, no matter what I try. I even tried to shoot something else holding the camera and not using the timer; they were soft too. The only sharp photos I can get is with the onboard flash - which is not giving me the look I desire - or no flash; both in one of the Auto modes (haven't tried this in Manual mode). Can anyone give me any insight as to what I'm doing wrong or if there's an inherent problem using off camera flash with the A3000? Honestly, I can't remember the last time I used it with flash and if so, whether the results were as desired. Thank you. Marc

I have owned a Sony Zeiss 24-70/2.8 SSM lens for about 6 years. Since I bought it (new), I have told myself the sharpness at the corners is normal. Maybe I have been trying to justify the cost of the lens, but I want to know what you think. I also want to hear form other SAL2470Z owners. What do you think of the lens you own? Does it look like this in the corners? (For full resolution version, click here.) This shot was handheld with a Sony a900 at ISO200, 1/500sec, ƒ7.1. I made sure to turn off any distortion correction in Capture One, and turned the sharpening down to zero. Note the smeared details at the corners. For what it's worth, no amount of correction in Capture One fixes this issue. Everywhere else in the image is amazingly sharp and always has been. It's just the corners that annoy me. If this were a $500 lens, I'd maybe get used to it, but it was over $1200 and that stings. I've also noticed that even a single filter causes terrible vignetting at the corners at 24mm. Again, I've told myself this is normal, but it sucks when I use a polarizing filter for a landscape and I end up with black corners at the widest focal length. You can see it slightly in this shot. Apertures smaller than ƒ8 are much worse.

Greetings! I'm from Germany, so my English might be not the best - sorry for that I have got some seroius problems with my Alpha 6000 and my 3 lenses (12mm Samyang, Sony Kit 16-50mm and Sony SEL 18-105mm) and searched nearly the whole internet and YouTube - I still have no idea what's the problem, so mabye someone here can help me. My problem: ALL pictures with EVERY lense in EVERY mode and all the various settings are unsharp. It's not like an ISO-noise. I got the feeling that the camera sometimes doesn't even focus the right way (and that for the "superfast autofocus"...). I tried really everything and gone through all the theory, so I know what I should do to get good pictures in the different modes, but even the Auto-Mode is really really bad in picture quality (it's unsharp, colors got a too high saturation, ...). Before this I used a Nikon D5300 with a Kit-lense and the pictures were perfect, far better than the ones I get with A6000 So my question is: What I am doing wrong? Is there some major setting I didn't see or could it be that my camera is damaged somehow? I bought it a few weeks ago and I am on an Englandtrip right now (so I expected to have fun with the camera and the pictures...) and since I bought it the pictures are not really sharp I thought it might be a setting problem, so I wanted to give it a try, but now I am totally done, I have no further ideas. Thank you so much for reading my post!