Well, all reviews have their failings, all reviewers their biases, and more and more common these days, reviews are being influenced by advertising dollars. One must read reviews with a great deal of skepticism ....
Shel Belinkoff > [Original Message] > From: Frantisek Vlcek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Hi, > a little rant on websites reviewing digital cameras follows... > > after reading several Reichmann's (www.luminous-landscape.com) > "reviews", it seems to me he is overly uncritical to some products. > I will not speculate on the cause of this, perhaps he has just > different needs. But he is biased nevertheless, in my opinion. I am > not talking about being paid by a brand or something (see Michael > Johnson's recent SMP column for a funny read on that), but just > that he reviews with total hype and PR style. PR which lot of times > is for some product. That's not a review, that's PR, advertising, > etc. > The last is definitely DXO OpticsPro, an image enhancement program. > In his review of this software (used to automatically correct > distortion, lateral chromatic aberation and vignetting, something > that was possible even before with freeware PanoramaTools but at > the expense of long experimenting to find the proper parameters). > > Well, to put it short, the DXO program has the parameters built-in > for many combinations already. That is good. Bad thing is, the > company (and review) present it as breaktrough innovation, when it > is all something that was done thousand times before manually. > That's just the marketing and PR bastards inventing new buzzwords > in Dilbert's style. We all know PR & marketing people are like > lawyers. That a reviewer participates in it is another thing. > > And he presents the results as "dramatic improvement in several > aspects of image quality, and no visible negative affects at all" > (see his review). What I see is dramatic oversharpened image and > therefore resolution loss of smallest details. And this USM-like > function is called Blur and they even invented their own "units" > for it, BxU for sure! Now that's marketing "blursh*t" all over. > > Anyway, see the images for yourself. The original is much more > pleasing and doesn't look oversharpened nor artifical, which the > "corrected" image does. > > Nevertheless, the program seems to nicely correct distortion and > chromatic aberation. But one could do that freely before with many > tools, some more advanced, some less. > > Still, Reichmann speaks of it as a great achievement, dramatic > improvement, etc... all using buzzwords that are inapropriate and > "dramatic". In fact, he is right there doing PR for the product > using typical PR strategies. > > It seems to me that there are not much good review sites. DPREVIEW > is much much worse, with Phil Askey (career in computers and web, > almost nothing with professional photography, and it can be seen in > his reviews). But the general public, is probably satisfied. At > least L-L focuses more on usage of cameras, although Reichmann > still uses very strange statements at times. > > Good light, > Frantisek Vlcek
