You may prefer not to apply sharpening, which is fine. The M8 does not have an anti-aliasing filter, so in principle M8 images may require less sharpening (or different sharpening methods than images from cameras with anti-aliaing filters. But all digital images (except those with essentially no detail whatsoever) benefit from sharpening.
From:
http://www.bythom.com/sharpening.htm
"Why Is Sharpening Necessary?
The nasty truth underlying all digital recording techniques is that they turn analog signals into discrete samples of the original. CD players, for example, sample sounds at 44 kilohertz (i.e., 44 thousand times a second) and record each sample using 16 bits of data. The frequency of digital sampling and the amount of data sampled determine how well the analog original can be reproduced. The coarser the sampling, the less the digital recording is like the original.
State of the art consumer digital cameras have a sampling frequency of 4500 by 3000 pixels (e.g., Kodak Pro 14n), with the amount of data recorded being 12 bits for each of the red, green, and blue colors. These numbers are actually relatively crude compared to the analog reality, where detail and color variations are nearly infinite. The real world sports an infinite number of shades of blue in the sky and an endless amount of detail, but your digital camera only captures between 1000 and 4500 pixels of horizontal detail in perhaps thousands of shades of possible blues. While that�s pretty darn good, it does cause two resolution-oriented problems:
1. Detail smaller than the pixel size is usually lost.
2. Where transitions between details occur within the area of a single pixel, the transition usually results in a digital value that is neither of the original values.
This second problem is what makes details in your photographs look fuzzy. The classic example is that of a diagonal transition line that transects a pixel. The pixel can either be white, black, or some in between value. If the camera were to render the pixel as entirely white or black, then you�d see an artifact known as the stairstep, so named because a diagonal line gets rendered as a series of pixel blocks that resemble a set of two-dimensional stairs. The alternative is to record the pixel as an "in-between" gray (which still produces a bit of a stairstep effect, but isn't quite as obvious). Neither case is correct, and both tend to reduce apparent sharpness.
All digital cameras use in-camera interpolation to detect edge transitions, and use some form of digital sampling to create in-between values for those diagonal lines. The result? Instead of a precise transition from one pixel value to another, diagonal details (and sometimes small horizontal and vertical details) are rendered as a more gradual transition from one color to another. Our brains have been programmed to see blurry or soft edges as being out-of-focus, thus unmodified digital photographs always tend to look just a tad soft. That's even true of higher resolution cameras and scanners' film images I've had scanned on 4000 dpi drum scanners still look a little soft in the detail areas."
and
From:
http://www.creativepro.com/article/...ow-about-sharpening-photoshop-were-afraid-ask
This was written by Bruce Frazier who wrote: before his untimely death.
"It's a sad but undeniable fact of life: Whether you scan, shoot, or capture, the process of digitizing images introduces softness, and to get great-looking results, you'll need to sharpen the great majority of digital images."
"The softness introduced during digitizing results from the very nature of the digitizing process. To represent images digitally, we must transform them from continuous gradations of tone and color to points on a regular sampling grid. Detail that's finer than the sampling frequency gets "averaged" into the pixels, softening the overall appearance. ... As a result, just about every digital image requires sharpening, no matter what its source, to counteract the softness introduced both in the capture and output processes."