Ah - that is useful to know. I'll admit my knowledge here is dated - the first DSLR I ever picked up, a Canon EOS20D + Sigma 70-300 F4-5.6 yielded incredibly disappointing results out of the camera - but (at least at the time) - it was widely understood that you had to run a sharpening filter.

Presumably the camera does this directly now?

The camera-processed JPEGs already have filters applied, most likely including a sharpening pass.