Mark Roberts wrote: > I always thought the fact that they compare digital SLR's but do so > without using the same lens on the cameras under test made their image > quality assessments worse than useless. It's not as if there aren't > some well-regarded third-party lenses available in all the major lens > mounts to make this possible.
Yes and no. Even using a given third-party lens, you (or someone else) could argue that lens vary sample to sample, so the resulting quality assessment is debatable at best. Then, provided that DPReview is using comparable lenses (which they do), I don't find useless to know what quality I can get once I enter a given camera system (which to some extent means a camera and its genuine lens, doesn't it?). > Furthermore, their emphasis on JPEG over Raw in their image quality > assessments is completely outdated now. It might have made sense years > ago, when Raw shooters were a small niche in the digital market, but > they're not any more. In fact, amongst the people who really *care* > image quality, such as DP Review claimed to be testing, they're the > majority. DP Review always took the position that the average user > shoots JPEG and prints pretty much what comes out of the camera, but > the irony is that nowhere is this kind of photographer less common that > amongst the users of DP Review, who tend to be pixel peepers who go to > great lengths to eke the most out of each shot (with varying degrees of > success). Furthermore, I think that many prospect users are not so interested in a sensor test. They are interested in camera performance. For those wanting to shoot RAW exclusively - and provided that DPReview or someone else would ony test RAW performance - you could look at the Nikon D80 or Sony Alpha 100 test for knowing what to expect from the K10D. Even worse: which converter of choice for testing RAW files? Which release? Isn't that changing on an almost daily basis? How to get comparable results? Then, isn't it possible that a given converter or a given conversion (or a given tester!) would be biased toward a camera, or sensor, or whatever? I'm truly afraid that your suggested test procedure will result being far more debatable than testing a camera JPEG performance, which at least can be rather associated to a given camera. Dario -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
