  We study the scalar condensate and the topological susceptibility for a
continuous range of quark masses in the Schwinger model with $N_f=0,1,2$
dynamical flavors, using both the overlap and the staggered discretization. At
finite lattice spacing the differences between the two formulations become
rather dramatic near the chiral limit, but they get severely reduced, at the
coupling considered, after a few smearing steps.
