High or Low F-stop?

Yes, a small pixel pitch (i.e. high pixel density) is worse for evaluating sharpness. Your 32" 4K monitor has a pixel density of only 138 ppi (pixels per inch), which is a the low side. It will be good for evaluating sharpness, though a monitor with a ppi closer to 100 would make it even slightly easier. And yes, when you're using a low ppi monitor like yours, zooming into 200% offers no advantage. Even with high ppi monitors it's a flawed approach (the image is being interpolated, etc). 
By high resolution (again, in terms of pixel density), I'm talking about monitors with a ppi in the 200+ range. They are very common these days. I have a 15.6" 4K laptop (282 ppi) and an older 15.6" 1080p laptop (141 ppi), and it's impossible to see sharpness differences on the 282 ppi screen that are immediately apparent on the 141 ppi screen. The high ppi screen is terrible for evaluating sharpness. I also have a 27" 2.5K NEC monitor (109 ppi), and not surprisingly it's excellent for evaluating sharpness.
Have you ever done a side by side comparison evaluating sharpness at 100% on high ppi and low ppi monitors? If not, give it a try. You may be surprised by the results.

On 8/5/2022 at 9:59 PM, Isaac Szabo said:

Nice shot! If you want its sharpness to be critically evaluated you would need to share the full resolution image or a 100% crop (not that I'm asking you to go to the trouble of doing that). But like I said earlier, there's nothing wrong with choosing to shoot at f/29 if you value DOF over sharpness for a particular shot or if the image won't be used at a large size.

OK, here is the original shot, completely uncropped.   It wasn't very cropped to start with.

6 hours ago, phxazcraig said:

OK, here is the original shot, completely uncropped.   It wasn't very cropped to start with.

Hi Craig. I'm afraid you've misunderstood. To evaluate sharpness, one needs to view the image at it's original resolution at 100% zoom (actual pixels). Since uploading full resolution images to the internet has its challenges, oftentimes a smaller crop of just the relevant part of the image is uploaded instead (i.e a 100% crop). The key is that the image cannot be downsized if you want its sharpness to be accurately evaluated. The images you have shared have been downsized greatly from their original resolution, and it's not possible to truly evaluate their sharpness at that size. 

Here's an example. If you compare my 2 feather images uncropped and downsized to web resolution, you cannot see the difference in sharpness:

On the other hand, if you compare a 100% crop of the 2 images (again, actual pixels, no downsizing), the loss of sharpness due to diffraction is clear:

Well, I did post an extreme crop in my first example.   Not sure it's 1 to 1, but it's close.

It seems to me that you are missing the point - there is sharpest, and there is sharp enough.   My shot is just an example to show the effects of F29 and that you still have detail there. 

2 hours ago, phxazcraig said:

Well, I did post an extreme crop in my first example.   Not sure it's 1 to 1, but it's close.

It seems to me that you are missing the point - there is sharpest, and there is sharp enough.   My shot is just an example to show the effects of F29 and that you still have detail there. 

The "extreme crop" you posted has been downsized (unless it was shot on an old, low resolution camera), yet its lack of sharpness due to shooting at f/29 is already apparent. It would be even more apparent at the original resolution - especially if you had an f/8 or f/11 shot to compare it to.

Please explain what point I'm missing? Like I said in my first post and several others, the loss of sharpness due to shooting at high f stops only matters if the images will be viewed at a large size, and for some people the gains in DOF will trump the losses in sharpness. In other words, I've been saying a version of "there is sharpest, and there is sharp enough" all along. If you prefer the results you get at f/29, there's nothing wrong with that.