Pat had the camera set to “Landscape” setting and increased the sharpness. This didn’t work in favour of sharpness so I changed it back to standard. My landscape setting on my own camera does the same thing – softens the image somewhat. The other thing was the focus setting. The camera was allowed to select any of the various focus areas in the camera that it thought best. This was changed to centre focus on the setting that let you choose which area of the image to focus on.
I did a test with the SonyA100 and the Canon 400D turned out equal with all focus and sharpness tests but excelled at higher ISOs.