First of all, there's no full resolution examples so you wouldn't be able to tell if this is "SLR quality" or not, whatever that means. The photographer has nothing to do with the quality of the lens: the best photographer won't be able to correct softness in the edge of a cheap superzoom lens. It's just physics. But lastly, the whole point of this method is to improve quality of bad lenses. Meaning, the whole point of the thing is that the pictures aren't top quality.
There are plenty of crappy lenses on DSLRs, too, with a very few rare gems in the sub-$1000 range. Canon's 85/1.8 and 40/2.8 stand out in my mind as excellent but the remainder of their mainstream ( non-L ) range is pretty mediocre.
It's how lens manufacturers keep their 'professional series' lenses lucrative... don't want people being satisfied with what they can afford!
On the other hand, the 'average' kit not terribly fast kit zoom lenses have gotten way better over the last 10+ years. There are way fewer total dogs. Put one in the hands of a decent photographer and they can get a good image.
(that said, if you want sharp, the 50/1.8 at f8 will be sharp enough. but sharp isn't everything. )
Suppose you do an experiment with three groups of people: one that is used to taking pictures with their smartphones, one that already worked with a DSLR one and lastly a bunch of professional photographers. Now give all of them the same high-end DSLR+quality lense and send them out to take pictures. Your claim seems to be all three groups would take equally good pictures. My claim: no way. Experienced photographers for instance just know things about lighting etc that take years to learn and won't be in your textbook.
The professional photographer doesn't change anything about the purely technical aspects of the image, though (which is defined only by the sensor and lens). This isn't about magically improving crappy photos but rather improving photos taken with a crappy lens (an obvious application would be cameras in phones).
That a good photographer is able to deliver a far better photo despite the constraints of his tools goes without saying, but it's not what this is about.
No. My claim is that this (very interesting) article is about improving quality from low quality lenses, and quality of photographer has nothing to do with this problem. Given a low quality lens, a professional photographer is still going to come out with a fuzzy image.
