Things in Thailand just took a big turn downward with the latest escalation between protesters and police/military. For the first time in 18 years Bangkok is now under a restrictive curfew. The scary aspect of yesterday's fighting was that protesters starting burning symbols of authority and money--banks, shopping malls, and the stock exchange were targeted by Red Shirt protesters.
The Nikon-related aspect of this is that the plant that makes the D3000, D5000, D90, an D300s is less than an hour from downtown Bangkok. Certainly the chaos now ensuing in the capital must be having some small impact on Nikon. With two new consumer bodies likely to be in or near production in the Ayutthaya facility, one has to wonder about whether on-going disruption will impact Nikon's ability to launch these products in a normal fashion.
For instance, the US State Department this week issued a travel warning that suggests "US citizens should defer all travel to Bangkok..." I'm not aware of a similar warning from the Japanese government, but the Japanese embassy in Thailand closed on Monday. Normally, engineers from Japan would be traveling to and from the Thailand plant as a new model nears introduction.
We can only hope for the safety of the Nikon employees and that any disruption Nikon might experience is short-lived.
Blame the Messenger
May 17 (commentary). Since posting my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 review, I've gotten a number of "you must have a bad sample" emails from people. Others just challenged my testing. One of the reasons that review came a bit later than my two 35mm reviews was that I was indeed worried that I might have a bad sample, so I quickly arranged to check another sample. But I got virtually the same results from it, so either Sigma's quality control is quite bad or my results were correct. You can form whatever opinion you'd like to about that.
As to the testing methodologies, I do not simply fill the frame with the chart, and I don't simply trust the phase detect AF to get things right. My assistant and I work hard to get proper chart alignment and focus.
However, the images I publish in reviews are without any post processing or sharpening, which is probably what is throwing many of you. You can't actually get real, comparable resolution numbers by running things through post.
Let me illustrate. Here's the same image: what I posted below in the Results section of my review is on top; what you can obtain from that same image with careful post processing is on the bottom.
Pretty dramatic difference, right? All I've done is correctly position the white and black points and add a modest Unsharp mask. Still think I got a "bad sample" of the lens? This illustrates something that a lot of people don't get about the Web and why I don't put a lot of numbers or images in my reviews: it's really easy to accidentally make things into something they're not. It's also very easy for people to come to an incorrect conclusion based upon a post processed image.
Everyone would say the bottom image is sharp and contrasty, but the top image is unsharp and has low contrast. But they're the same image from the same lens. Consistent and correct testing reveals relative differences between lenses, and the only way I can even begin to show that on the Web is via unprocessed images. One tenet in testing is that the more variables you throw into a test, the more things that can go wrong, and the more likely it is that you draw incorrect conclusions.
As I replied to one person, there is a difference between a "good enough" lens and a "good" lens. The Sigma can be used in ways that make it "good enough" and will create images wide open that people find good, but it is not a "good" lens optically at f/1.4 in my testing the way I rate lenses. When I look at the raw numbers out of Imatest, it is down significantly in MTF in the central area compared to the Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G DX, and way down at the edges. It simply isn't as sharp a lens as the Nikkor wide open, and until someone can show me otherwise, I'll stand by that statement. But if you're running contrast and sharpening in your end results, you may not exactly see how or how much the Sigma is underperforming the Nikkor, as the post processing starts to mask the differences and your results are suddenly "good enough." Moreover, you're starting to test the camera's post processing or yours, not the optical ability of the lens.
The funny thing is that absolute newcomers to digital have the opposite reaction to their initial digital images. They're often not good enough. That's because the aliasing robs them of sharpness until they run them through proper capture sharpening and contrast tweaks. Even great lenses tend to look a bit weak on a test chart image that hasn't been processed in any way.