ackas

It really isn't hard to hand shoot the lens... and often I feel that people saying it isn't sharp are really talking about that they manually focused a little off. But the trade off of compactness, light weight, and overall portability is the reason to use the lens; the 100-400mm is anything but. I find it extremely silly though, that you all are doing little more than bandwagoning "eww, donuts" when some of these shots do well at minimizing those donuts and focusing on the subject. Others... well.... yeah, you really need space between your subject and the background; but not all of them are bad, and many are rather nice. Remember, the number one rule in photography is that it is not the lens you wish you had on you, but the lens you have, that you work with. If you want to lug the 100-400mm around and are fine with that, then that is your style of photography and nothing is wrong with it. But if you generally handshoot and enjoy keeping a light pack of smallish lenses... that's the market here. No one lens is perfect, but the 300mm reflex lens does have its own niche.

I don't know why people keep posting well exposed images instead of "lowish light files" https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/image-comparison/fullscreen?attr18=lowlight&attr13_0=sony_a6300&attr13_1=fujifilm_xt1&attr13_2=fujifilm_xt2&attr13_3=nikon_d5500&attr15_0=raw&attr15_1=raw&attr15_2=raw&attr15_3=raw&attr16_0=6400&attr16_1=6400&attr16_2=6400&attr16_3=6400&attr171_0=off&normalization=full&widget=1&x=-0.4726285714285715&y=0.6161676646706589 Same dpreview post, but moved to an area of the image that is "lowish light" and those blacks are clearly noisier. Of course, we're not really looking at the pure raw and instead seeing some demosaiced version which likewise introduces degrees of noise-filtering and various distortions. Since the algorithm used to demosaic likewise contributes to how the noise is interpreted as color information; well... it's hard to call it equal comparisons, is it? I'd also like to add in that getting a perfectly grey "noise" layer upon applying the lpf (AA), down sampling, then applying a sharpening layer... well, it is a lossy technique. Professional software does this all behind the scenes and in most cases, you'll be happy with the results; just that it is notable to explain there are compromise being made here, there is no one good method to rule them all.