There's been a lot of bandwidth burned over the supposedly soft images and poor focus results from the 10D. One suggestion that has been receiving lots of positive feedback has been using the "Clear All Custom Functions" command on the 10D. This, it is hypothesised, is the equivalent of the traditional three-fingered salute in the PC arena: to cause a reboot.

As I've noted in my 10D Blog, I'm not entirely convinced that the AF in my camera is properly calibrated, so I figured there's nothing to lose by trying this procedure. It's explained in the manual on page 152. There is a menu option "Clear Settings", choosing this in the normal way gives a further choice to "Clear all camera settings" or "Clear all Custom Functions".

I wanted to collect some before and after shots to use as evidence to determine whether the procedure has any effect, but I have to confess I made a complete pig's ear of this. I first of all considered using a tripod, but decided to handhold and use the camera in the normal way. I wandered around the house, taking shots using the camera settings as I had configured them in the past two or three days. This meant shooting raw and using the centre AF point. I mounted my 24-70L lens and set Av mode with maximum aperture f/2.8  using ISO 200 (that I mostly used on my D30). Having taken some shots, I applied both reset options, and duplicated my test shots. Now I remembered to adjust ISO and Av settings, but completely forgot that the image format would have gone back to Large/Fine JPG and not raw - oy, what a plonker! Anyway rather than abandon the test altogether I converted the "before" images using BreezeBrowser into 8-bit JPG using normal settings for all options including sharpness, hoping that this will be similar to the in-camera defaults.

Here's one set of before and after images.

The examples are quite conclusive, and if it wasn't for two things I'd be really, really happy: first, I messed up the experimental method, so I'm not absolutely certain that large/fine JPG's with the default settings give identical results to raw files converted to JPG using normal settings. Secondly, I had another stab at checking front- and back-focusing, which once more didn't give results that were spot on, although again it wasn't a completely foolproof set-up. On the other hand, I converted one of the images again using Camera Raw with a high sharpness setting of 75, and it was still much less sharp than the after-JPG's.

So with some reservations, I have to conclude that the "Clear Settings" does have a positive effect.