A few photo questions

A couple of things really. (Apologies if this drifts Off Topic)
1) Film scanners for 35mm colour film.... any recs on good products to scan these into digital archive? My dad got a cheapie from the AusPost last year and it's probably alright for b/w and OLD film but I am not happy with the colour rendering with some of mine. The film is only 10 yrs old and .. well, at this point I'd be better off scanning the original prints!

2) My camera. I used my trusty Olympus AZ-200 for nearly 20 yrs before getting the Olympus FE-4030 in 2010 just before I went back to the UK for a holiday. Both point and shoot because I found I was pretty bad at remembering all the exposure stuff and also getting the focus right (I wear glasses now... hmmm). I possibly don't have super steady hands? But with the AZ-200 this never seemed to matter. I took some brilliant pics.
eg:
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But I've found with the FE-4030 that it can't seem to cope with an "infinity" shot? Regardless, the top right hand corner of EVERY pic seems to blur slightly.
Eg.
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At first I thought it was because I was forgetting to turn off the macro setting (and sometimes I did) but it seems to happen all the time.

Now I'm wondering what to do...

Can you switch it to full manual to do some tests?

Dunno. Certainly focus is auto. I can play around a bit with exposure and stuff I think (have done that for red/pink roses).

What I'm getting at is that not all lenses are created equal. Sometimes, at certain settings, they will give you sharp images and at other times at other settings they give you poor blurry images. If you can switch to manual mode try taking a photo of the same thing at the smallest f-stop, a middle-range f-stop and the highest f-stop and then check the clarity of the images. The rationale behind this is that they use different parts of the lense to make the photo. The lowest one uses the very edges of the lense through to the middle and softness often creeps in at the edges as you are showing. Middle range cuts out some of the edge of the lense often giving you the sharpest photos and the largest ones pretty much use the middle of the lense and can create focus issues too. If you can use the automatic timer as well and place the camera on a flat surface to take the photos (unless you have a tripod) that will eliminate shaking of the camera.

That's kind of what I have been trying to work out ("is it possible to change settings") but I don't think I can - or at least I don't think I can change past certain pre-sets. And I can't find any facility for f-stops on this .... (Maybe I need to email you the manual? Because, to be honest, I don't really know what I am looking at/for)

can you post pictures of all your controls of the camera on here..

Well.... bit tricky when it is all computery and on the only camera I have...
Here's some snapshots from the manual. I presume this is the kind of area I should be looking at?
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You haven't got it on wide angle or panorama have you?

Nope. The camera usually defaults to "Auto" on start up. ("Auto" as opposed to Pano or video etc).
Of course it may have helped if I had read the manual more before the holiday but I think I bought it the day before I left!
I just think it weird that the camera can't cope with landscape type pics when in Auto mode. Turns out I can manually select "Landscape" (as a setting) - but I would have to re-set that every single time I turned the camera back on so I never bothered with it. Possibly a mistake..
I'll experiment with that but I'm not convinced yet that it isn't an issue with the lens itself...

I have noticed that down the bottom of my read out screen it says "F 2.8".

Relevant? Dunno how to change that - I've fiddled with a few settings and haven't come across it yet.

F2.8 refers to the aperture settings. The aperture is like the iris of your eye. In high light it closes down to reduce the amount of light passing through the lens and in low light it opens wider to let in as much light as possible.

F2.8 is a low f-stop but at this value the aperture is wide open. At high f-stops (like f22) the aperture is quite small, so it's a inverse relationship; the smaller the aperture the more it is open.

Aperture controls depth of field. At a small f-stop like f2.8 the depth of field is shallow. That means the amount of the image in front of AND behind the point of focus that is sharp is quite small. At a high f-stop the amount of the image that is in clear focus infront of and behind the focal point is large. If you could change the aperture settings (is there an Av mode?) and you can set the aperture to a larger value and so get more in clear focus.

I don't think this is so much a lens issue as a depth of field issue you are seeing.

Hmmmm Thanks for that. More experiments for me then...!