CCD density.. it really counts.
In the first 2 pics (and in the magnified ones) you can see the same imagecaptured by SonY and Canon; as before, Canon is sharper than Sony.
In the third images Canon has been downsampled to 1000 pixel H,and then again upsampled to 1440 (bicubic). As you can see, the apparent qualityis the same as Sony camera, which, at CCD level, has about 1000 photosites for each line.
(As you can see the pixel shift is not good enough).
Of course Canon is a little bit better even after the Dw-Up sampling, because the bigger number of the photosites acts like an upsampling compensating for the larger aperture of the less packed Sony CCD.

Sony with canon 14X manual lens full wide - detail 2x

Canon with canon 14X manual lens full wide - detail 2x

Canon with canon 14X manual lens full wide - detail 2x Downsampled - Upsampled