I've just had an interesting discussion/debate with a guy in one of Sydneys camera shops after taking this lens back querying it's sharpness (purchased from them 3 months ago)
I showed him how I could manual focus it to be much sharper than with auto focus which looked soft at 2.0 aperture in both cases

His argument was that it was a portrait lens & wasn't supposed to be sharp as such
while I agree with him partially in that super sharpness doesn't make for a good portrait, I still think its a bit of a cop out that it can't auto focus to it's capability as it does in MF

I don't necessarily want to restrict myself to taking only portraits with it, so there begins the debate:

Would you expect any lens, including this one, to be sharp as a sign of quality or should you not expect so much because it is a "portrait lens"

Thoughts anybody ?