mtbear

You might try renting lenses to test them out.

sloscheider Loc: Minnesota

I confess I haven't read all the responses but my suggestion for sports like soccer would be to invest in an 80-200 2.8 variant. They're great all around lenses but not exactly cheap. They'll follow you to a full frame camera body if you ever go that route. You'll have a 1.6 crop factor (I believe) on your present camera body.

There are used f4 versions out there for cheap, I don't know how good they are.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

Kit lenses aren't so bad that they look soft. Kit lenses are typically quite good but the higher end lenses can let you recognize a "bonus" image quality improvement over the common everyday lens that is typically subtle. Unless one has decades of experience with high end lenses, most shooters can't even tell the difference until they have experience under their belt. Those who have higher end lenses are the ones who "talk down" at kit lenses being crappy while kit lens users are the dominant part of the market, so they aren't typically fuzzy, soft, and unsharp. For normal everyday shooting they're usually more than adequate - even more so today than 10 years ago because of technical advances in lens manufacturing. I have a friend with a Nikon D5100 and a kit lens and his nature shots of butterflies and bugs are phenomenal beyond anything I could have imagined - and he's just a beginner using the camera on full auto.

The Canon SX-50 (and I assume the newer SX-60) is so sharp that photos posted on here of nature shots show every single hair of an animal and every single feather of a bird tac sharp when zoomed to 600 - 1000mm equivalent and they have a small sensor compared to yours. Those cameras are only $400 or less with a massive zoom lens so certainly a T4i reaching no more than 250mm should be able to blow away a $400 Canon Bridge model.

I'd suggest first going into your camera menu system and find the "sharpness" control. I don't have Canon so I don't know where it is or what it's called but you can set it higher to create more sharpness. I had to do that on one of my earlier digitals and left it on "one step" sharper than normal the whole time I had it.

Also consider your computer monitor and whether it's up to the job of displaying sharply. Keep in mind that you used to look at prints of your film shots but now you depend on a monitor to view them before printing instead. Take a USB thumb drive of your photos straight out of the camera to Best Buy and look at your shots on a PC connected to a big Samsung monitor or on an Apple iMac with a Retina display. You may find out it's not the lens at all!