While I was away from for the month, the Internet provided the following gems to ponder:
“You just need to be close on the focus to get a good shot.” — purported lens “review”
This is what I fight against all the time. Plenty of things called reviews appear on sites with lots of Web traffic. What inevitably happens is that when I write my review about the same product and make critical comments, these other low calorie reviews are raised to “prove” I’m wrong.
In this particular case, the reviewer was really commenting about depth of field instead of the optical acuity of the lens. Unfortunately, depth of field isn’t a fact, it’s one of several take-your-pick theories that all live in the “good enough” realm. Which good enough is actually good enough for you will depend upon how you use and evaluate images, not on how good that particular lens is. One of the images shown as representative of how good this particular lens was had clear ghosting and dust spots on the image sensor. Another had clear camera motion artifacts. So you have to wonder what the “reviewer” was actually seeing.
What’s even more interesting is that the particular “review” that triggered my comment here was posted verbatim and near simultaneously on at least four photography sites that I could find, none being the reviewer’s own site (unless the name on the review is a pen name). This makes it even more likely that someone sees that particular review, and later wonders why I saw something differently.
There’s a lot of dross on the Internet. The Internet does not have a dross filter (and Google long ago stopped being a search site that put sites with proven integrity first in search results).
"Photographer Becomes Online Hit With Presets That Mimics [sic] Fujifilm X100V” — Petapixel headline
Quote from article: “She realized that she could make presets on Adobe Lightroom that imitate the photos producted on the Fujifilm X100V camera.”
Uh, yeah. Moreover, I’ve never agreed that the film simulations built into the Fujifilm cameras actually are good mimics of the films that they were named after. Velvia on the Fujifilm cameras, for instance, doesn’t crush black like the film does.
You know where I’m going with this: some of us have been building the “looks” that we want for our images from the beginning of digital. That the camera companies do it as JPEG styles in the camera is merely a shortcut. There’s nothing particularly magical about the Fujifilm film simulations. They are reasonably well chosen end points for the data that comes off the image sensor, each differentiated just enough so as to provide a useful set of choices. But that’s never been out of the realm for any photographer on any camera using raw data since forever. Heck, if you study the JPEG settings of any camera, you can build similar looks.
What boggles my mind with these presets is that we are seeing a new form of lazy. Choosing a film simulation on the Fujifilm and capturing JPEGs is the ultimate lazy, but now we have an intermediary: use the preset that simulates the simulation.
“Canon R8 Sensor Leaves DXOMark Speechless with Impressive Test Scores” --headline on rumor site
I’m pretty sure that the DXOMark Web site doesn’t have a text-to-speech function built in, so the site is pretty darned speechless to start with.
The quote that generated the wildly click bait headline was actually “the Canon EOS R8 has similar performance characteristics to BSI sensors from rivals.” Even that requires a bit of explanation.
The larger the photosite area—and 24mp full frame has large photosites—the more of the FSI (front side illuminated) surface is used to collect light. Even the 2012 Nikon D600 “has similar performance characteristics to BSI sensors from rivals.” (A dirty little fact of some recent BSI implementations is that they still don’t use the full surface area of the image sensor to collect light, by the way.)
Thus, today I’m going to run with the headline “Nikon D600 Stuns Internet by Matching Canon R8 Test Scores”. Ouch.
Stop responding to click bait headlines by clicking. You’ll always be disappointed in the outcome (unless you’re naive enough to believe the headline over the article content, and the article content over reality).
“People pose on TikTok with a [Fujifilm] X100V.” — dpreview interview with Fujifilm execs
Okay, I get it: you’re proud to have created a product that people want to be associated with in some way. But really, is Fujifilm in the fashion business or the camera business? Fashion is ephemeral and changes rapidly. Camera sales are declining and need better iterations to maintain sales volume. In particular, the camera industry keeps thinking that making something fashionable is the way to attract new, young purchasers. (It doesn’t help that one of the many repeated subthemes in recent science fiction is that fashionable will be more important in some way than functional in the future.)
I worry—hopefully unnecessarily—that the young see usefulness and tangible capability less important than just looking good. I’ve watched my own Boomer generation get highly distracted by things that are far less important than moving the bar of progress forward, despite the pace of change overall becoming quicker and in the case of things like environmental health, more destructive.
Ironically—I have no children—I’m one of those that believe that one of our key raison d’etre is to make things better for our children (those that follow us). That’s because our stories, no matter how good or how important, are only a middle. The story of humanity continues after us. If it doesn’t, I wasn’t enough of a narcissistic anarchist in my lifetime.
My message to the Fujifilm execs: okay, you’ve taken your prideful bow, now go out make a X100VI that knocks our socks off in terms of its capabilities.
“Nikon is the worst performer in low-light shooting environments, autofocus consistency and tracking reliability, and mirrorless camera range and support. Beyond that, Nikon’s image quality to gear price ratio is only average compared to others, and we don’t find Nikon camera bodies to be as durable over years of use as Sony or Canon.” —Slashgear article rating camera brands worst to best
Oh dear lord, where to start? And this is just in the bit about Nikon. Seven other brands were mostly maligned as well, because only Leica and Hasselblad are “best.”
It’s a rare article where I’d disagree with every sentence written, and be prepared to debunk it with data, but here it is (I’m not going to link to it, because it deserves no web hits). Of course, a Web site that was designed so that you can’t click on any link in the footer on the landing page because the articles will infinitely scroll infinitely to get in your way should be a clue.
I’m getting really tired of these so called “new media” sites. The few that had reasonable content are all closing down because they didn’t find a business model; the rest all just click bait you to death.
By the way, their “about” page says “providing trustworthy, daily news and thought-provoking commentary on everything happening in the automotive and technology industry.” [sic; apparently no copy editors] Nope, not trustworthy. News, not so much as opinion. Thought-provoking yes, but the thought that is provoked is “stop.” Everything? Really, everything? No, most of what they publish that isn’t opinion is what I’d call “thin” and scraped from other sources.
Unfortunately, this is a site that claims 5m readers a month. Which means there are 5m misinformed folk out there when it comes to cameras (and other subjects).
