Poor focus in Cycles render

Question

I have built a model using a mannequin and some text labels. When I render the scene with Cycles, I'm not getting a sharp focus on the objects in the scene. I'm trying to produce a 312x502px .png image of my scene.

I've played with the depth of field focus setting using both focusing on an object in the scene and using the distance setting, but neither caused any improvement. My aperture setting is radius with a size of 0.0, and I'm using an orthographic camera. At the moment, saving my rendered scene to a .png image produces an image of very poor focus.

I seem to get better image sharpness before rendering just using material viewport shading!

The depth of field of the objects I'm trying to get a sharp focus on are about 1 Blender grid square in depth where the grid floor scale is set at 16 lines, scale 1.1 and subdivisions 10. - pretty much the standard setting.

I can't believe that it's not possible to get a nice sharp image of a rendered scene; can someone give me some pointers as to where/what I should concentrate on to solve my fuzzy focus problem?

Answer 1

Firstly I'd like to thank you both very much for spending the time reading my question.

I continued to blunder around trying to solve my problem when I had a light bulb moment and noticed that in the 'sampling' section of the render panel it was set at Render :10 and Preview:10, obviously the default setting! And being new to blender I hadn't noticed. Anyway, I whacked up the Render value to 100, then 500 & finally 1000 and low & behold I got the razor sharp image I wanted, and spent the rest of the day feeling very pleased with myself.

So this is a case of self help, but thank you so much for reading my question!