The Utter Uselessness of Camera Reviews

Some time ago I inveighed against Photography Blog for their review of the Sigmas SD-1. It was so horrible that the bias of the magazine didn't just reveal itself between the lines; the article screamed it out for the world to see. But this problem is not unique to Photography Blog. It is not even unique to the world of cameras. It is pandemic across all websites that review products.

I read an article written by Frank Bruni, the ex-food critic for the New York Times, where he was talking about his review philosophy. Basically, he never reviewed restaurants that couldn't take it. As he saw it, a reviewer has an immense amount of power, especially one for a major publication like The Times. A bad review can, no exaggeration, be the cause of a restaurant's failure. As we learned from Spider-Man, with that power, comes responsibility.

For my part, especially when dealing with massive companies, this concern does not exist. The obligation of the reviewer does not belong at all to the company and belongs entirely to the consumer. These companies are asking consumers to spend money — a great deal of money at times. A good reviewer rips those products to pieces. That's the fucking job of a critic. That's why critics are different from some schmo on YouTube. They have experience; they have taste; they have the resources to effectively understand a product vis-a-vis the totality of other products on the market. If anything, a critic should be actively trying to ruin a product's reputation.

That said, I don't think that most major online publications are actually concerned about this. Especially in the tech world, very rarely does a single publication wield enough power to do significant damage. Still, their reviews are frequently useless.

For example, Cnet is a completely pointless pile of shit at this point in its life. It's a scam for people who don't know about other, smaller websites. Many years ago, they overhauled their review system from a 0-5 star rating to a 0-10 rating. This new system would not follow the academic system where anything below a 6 is considered poor. Instead, 5 would be perfectly average, 0 would be far below average, and 10 would be far above average.

What happened exposed the bias of major publications in the clarity that only pure numbers can bring. Since 5 was average, you would expect their average review to be, I dunno', 5?

Of course, it wasn't five. It was 7.something.

What's amazing is not the result, but that no one thought that putting a quantifiable measure to their reviews may be a bad idea. It revealed beyond doubt that giving a review score some sort of objective value was a terrible idea. It allows people to actually compare products in a meaningful way. Of course, this is precisely what readers would want, but it is precisely what companies do not want. And this is, as I'm sure you've guessed, the reason these companies are useless cyphers that do little but produce quotes for marketing efforts. And just so you don't think I'm picking on any specific company: every major publication is suffering from the exact same problem.

The question is of course why the hell the publications would do this? The answer is simple: they want to keep getting invited to the party. If a company sends you a product to review and you then rip it to shreds, you won't get any more products sent to you. It injects necessary an unavoidable bias into the review process. That's why Consumer Reports buys all of their review cars on the open market.

A recent example of this was in the admittedly elite world of sports cars. The UK reviewer Chris Harris went onto Jalopnik to rant about the way Ferrari handles review cars. Ferrari's answer was, of course, to ban him from ever driving one of their cars again. He is still banned to this day. (side note: if you have the money, never buy a Ferrari. I don't care what Ferris Bueller said.)

It is for this reason that we must adjust the way that we read reviews. On many websites, if they have a 5-star review system, anything below a 4 is total crap. Of course, they won't say this in the reviews, but that's the hidden meaning. When a website like Photography Blog or DPReview reviews dozens, perhaps hundreds of products every year, and almost every product scores the equivalent of 4-stars or higher, you know that something is fishy.

Many will attack me for being a curmudgeon, and perhaps I am. I'm not hating on companies and their products because I'm chasing some dragon of perfection. There is no dragon and there is no perfection, but there absolutely is a best product at the moment.

An element of product criticism that seems to have been completely abdicated by critics is the quality of a product in relation to other products. It doesn't matter if a new camera or car is a solid camera or car, if it's not as good as other products for the same price, you give that fucking thing one star! It reminds me of the maxim, there are no bad products, only bad prices.

This company is saying "give us your money!" If that company is not giving me as much as another company for the same amount of money, I want to know about it!

But that would be a terrible thing for major companies. Canon has been producing cameras that are no way near competitive with other companies for many years, but they have used their market dominance to effectively shut down criticism of that. Do you think that DPReview would ever rip into a Canon camera? No. They never, ever, ever will. If Canon produced a camera that literally did not work, DPReview would still give it a 65/100.

(Side note: This is only a mild exaggeration. The Pentax Q, a joke in the photography world, scored a 70. While on the subject of DPReview, I've noticed that when cameras are just so awful that they could never give it a good review, DPR simply doesn't review it. They never reviewed the Canon EOS M, and they didn't review the Sigma SD1 until the Merrill version came out along with its much, much, much lower price.)

The major companies work very hard to keep the landscape as it is. They want to maintain control over the publications that write about their products. When a publication gets out of line, they snatch away access to junkets, review products, and freebies.

Obviously, not all websites are like this. Steve Huff is great, as are a few independent developers. But they are photographers first, critics second. We need someone who has the money and the drive to be both a photographer and a critic. Someone who recognizes that their obligation lies with the readers, not with being soft on some multi-billion-dollar company's shitty products.

Luminous Landscape Get's Me Feeling All Self-Righteous

Luminous Landscape, one of the web's premier sources of camera geekery, has posted an "open letter" to camera manufacturers about lenses and sensor designs. I'm pissed and this helps to explain a few issues that I've had with cameras in low-light situations that I've simply explained as sensor noise.

Basically, large aperture lenses are great because they let in more light, but also let in more light from oblique angles. The light coming at the sensor from these more extreme angles is one of the reasons that large apertures gives you that shallow depth of field for buttery portraits.

This worked perfectly for film since the light-sensing aspect of film were tiny crystals in a substrate on the surface of the film, thus they were sensitive to light coming in from many angles. Digital cameras, on the other hand, are a sensor which points straight ahead. If the light is not coming from directly above, the sensor doesn't seem the image. This is the reason why the 4/3's format from Olympus and Co. was called the first fully digital camera system, because it took into account all of the unique aspects of digital photography.

All of the camera companies are trying to come up with ways to make their sensors better, including greater sensitivity, small lenses above each sensor site, etc. If this article from LL is to be believed, it's not enough and the camera companies have switched to cheating us.

Luminous Landscape, in association with DxOMark, have found that light loss at high apertures can get downright extreme. And to combat this, when using paired lenses, the camera will boost ISO WITHOUT YOU KNOWING. WTF?!

This is unacceptable. I buy pro-level tools to have manual control, not to give it up without my knowledge. The end results are all good, certainly, but I buy expensive stuff to get good photos in extreme light and movement conditions; the very places where these issues actually matter.

An Open Letter To The Major Camera Manufacturers

Lecia M9: Rich Bastard Edition

As if more evidence was needed to prove that Leica exists to let rich people feel self important, they have, in conjunction with the Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalog, announced the Neiman Marcus edition M9. This beauty can be yours for the low, low price of $17,500. You get a free lesson from some Leica expert (because, being rich, you don't actually know how to do anything).

I've never been a fan of Leica. And as their prices have gone from high to stratospheric in the last ten years, I don't even hear Leica fanboys defending the company as much as they used to. In the late 90's, Leica's most expensive lenses, like the Noctilux, were either on par, or only slightly more expensive than the best lenses from Zeiss, Canon, Nikon, and other optics companies. Now, their top-end Summilux lenses are clearing the $5,000 barrier, with the Noctilux coming in at an eye-watering $10,000. You could buy a Canon 5D MkII and two or three lenses for the same price. Utterly absurd. There is no way that price can be defended...

Unless you treat the Leica as a luxury item. You don't buy this if you care about photography, you buy it if you care about the camera. Because people don't buy luxury clothing because they care about keeping warm, they care about the style and the brand. That's a totally legitimate reason to purchase something! Still, I'm going to make fun of it. In the same way I make fun of men driving Ferraris and Aston Martins through rush hour... while, honestly, at the same time wanting one. I care about the photography and the final product. I've created some of my most beloved photos with plastic lenses, and rarely reach the limits of my six year old Canon EOS 20D.

If I was a top-pro photog, and resolution was really critical, I'd spend my money on medium format. If I was a journalist, I could never stomach the compromises of prime, viewfinder lenses. If I was an amateur, how the hell could I rationalize a camera that costs more than some cars? The only market left for Leica at these prices are rich people who care about the camera at least as much as the photo.

Flickr Amafessional?

I just read the Flickr community guidelines for the first time. The usual stuff, no hosting images here, don't call other people mean names, don't post your amateur porn, don't facilitate a Neo-Nazi uprising in Washington, you know, stuff that would otherwise happen all the time. There is one thing that stood out as definitely odd and possibly stupid.

Don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.
Flickr is for personal use only. If we find you selling products, services, or yourself through your photostream, we will terminate your account. Any other commercial use of Flickr, Flickr technologies (including APIs, FlickrMail, etc), or Flickr accounts must be approved by Flickr. For more information on leveraging Flickr APIs, please see our Services page. If you have other open questions about commercial usage of Flickr, please feel free to contact us.

What the hell are they talking about? Only for personal use? Flickr has a paid designation called pro! What the hell do they think pros are? People who just spend lots of money on camera equipment for the hell of it?

Why the Camera Companies Suck Balls

I present to you a photo of two remote shutters. One of them is a genuine Canon, the other is a cheap Chinese knock-off. Actually, no! It's not even a knock-off! It may look like a Canon, but it doesn't have the Canon logo on it, nor is it even for a Canon. It's for my Panasonic GF-1. But that's not important at this time. What is important is that they are both remote shutters. They both look similar. And they both get the job done perfectly.


But now for the big difference. One of them cost $70 and the other cost $8.99, which included shipping FROM HONG KONG.

Have you ever wondered why the remote shutter for the Canon Rebel line-up costs $30, or even the IR wireless shutter can be had for around $20? But then, the shutter for the next camera up costs over twice as much even though it does exactly the same thing? Because Canon is fucking you, that's why. They've made the cable connection different for every camera, which means you can't buy the cheaper shutter and use it on an expensive camera.

They think that if you can afford the nicer camera, you can afford to throw a bit more money at them. That's scummy. And Panasonic is even worse.

Now, you'd think that since the GF-1 is targeting a somewhat entry-level pro-sumer market that their accessories would be priced accordingly. Ha ha! Not at all! The remote shutter for my GF-1 is EIGHTY dollars! Ten dollars more! Spending more makes me feel professional!

Aggghh! The shutters all do precisely the same thing. Does my Chinese version feel a bit cheaper in the hand? Yeah. But it's firm and has already taken hundreds of photos with no signs of wear or tear. It's ridiculous and I hope I can stop as many people as possible from making my mistake.

I learned from it. I ditched many of the genuine accessories early on. Some of the parts, yes, you definitely want the genuine parts even if they're over-priced, but a fucking remote shutter is not one of them.

Screw them all. Hit eBay, and remind those retarded companies why China is eating their lunch.

New Raw Processing.

I'm new to the world of RAW photo processing. I've been doing it for a couple of years (All the cool kids DO it), but have only been using the RAW program that comes with Photoshop. I've experimented with all of the major programs and am just leveled by the amount of CPU cycles eaten up by these fucking horses of programs.

Adobe Lightroom, I'm being literal, sends my CPU to 100% with ANY ACTION. Any! It's absurd. I can only assume that someone operating on an old single-core cpu, although still running at 3.2Ghz, just isn't considered a legitimate market to Adobe.

DXO, Bibble, Capture One, the whole lot of them are similar. At least Bibble is a BIT faster. What the fuck! What ever happened to optimization? What ever happened to finding little tricks to reduce the CPU load? Why do I need a bloody server farm to process photos?

Capture One is a freaking nightmare. It creates cache folder EVERYWHERE, and never seems to store thumbnails. It always reloads photos when moving through a gallery. It's slow as a snail. How the hell is this worth $300? I'll tell you something, it's not. Not even close. It's not even worth pirating. Seriously, pirate something else.

Adobe Lightroom seems to be becoming my go-to program. Although, it's a lot slower than just running my raw files through Photoshop. Greater control; a butt-load slower. Lightroom tries to get you to use it as a full library and photo manager program... don't. It's slow as shit. Google's Picasa is free and it does a better job.

I can say from all of this is that if you're paying, get DXO. If you're pirating... well, still get DXO, but also consider Adobe Lightroom. Lightroom has an ENORMOUS problem in that it won't compensate for lens distortion. I have no idea what ganja Adobe is smoking to think that they can pass off a $400 program for RAW photos without any lens correction, but they're doing it. I would never buy Adobe. I'm kinda' sort of using it because I pirated it. Otherwise, DXO gets all of my love.

A shout-out to Noise Ninja, though. You should so get that.

W. T. F.

Ok, this has been pissing me off for some time.

Why are artists obsessed with the idea that art is valuable? It's not! But that's a good thing. Because the internet has revealed that most art never did in the first place.

What the internet has done is open the doors of production and distribution. Unfortunately, that's where art used to make its money. An image was valuable because it was hard to get. This wasn't because artists tried to make it hard to get, although many did just that, but because of the state of the world.

To get an image, it had to be painted, or printed, or silk-screened, or SOMETHING. Little ones and zeroes could not be simply beamed across fiber-optic lines from California to Kathmandu. This resulted in a natural scarcity and value to produced art.

For many forms of art, that's no longer the case. Anything that can be reduced to ones and zeroes is now, effectively worthless. That's not to say everything in the world of produced art is worthless, but what can be perfectly recreated is.

Photography people seem to think that the photos that they have taken are somehow worth something. I can't even stress how wrong that is. The photos that I have taken and posted online? Worthless. The photos in the future? Soon to be worthless.

And that's not a bad thing! Far from it. It frees the average artist from the old chains of the art community. Previously, every step of the way required a passing grade from arbiter of taste. Be it a magazine, a gallery, or a critic, you had to impress someone. No longer shall artists suffer the tyranny of the art world. Now, they can directly serve their art to the hungry masses. Just because the old profit model was predicated on this now-defunct art environment doesn't mean the money is gone. In fact, there's more money to be made than ever before.

Many elements of photography are still valuable. For example, high-quality prints of your work are worth something. It's difficult to produce them, requires time and energy and a detailed knowledge of how to correctly translate digital, three-color, RGB (red, green, blue) images from a computer monitor to the ink, four-color, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) images that are produced in print shops. It is that knowledge, work, and time that is valuable. The image itself is not. The goal of a photographer is to find ways to make money from what is scare and valuable and use what isn't scare to accentuate that process.

You want evidence of this? Just go to Deviant Art, or any artist's personal website. They've got images of their work galore... in low resolution, with watermarks all over it. Guys, if someone wants to steal your work, it's really easy to remove a watermark.

I went to Deviant Art and grabbed one of the top, all-time works. It's really quite good but has that massive watermark on it. You can view the artist's page here.

Here is my work at removing his watermark. You can still see traces of it, but that would be easy to remove with more time. My current work took, and I timed myself, slightly less than eleven minutes. It takes me longer to poop.




He rationalizes the watermark by complaining how people were passing off his work as their own, so he had to. But that doesn't matter. They're doing ADVERTISING for you, you idiots. People will see the work and want the artist. It doesn't matter if some dude is lying, because when they hire him and discover he sucks, they'll start trying to find the real artist. Or come across you by chance when researching the work. And if the thief tries to sell the work, then you can find out and simply sue him for very direct, cut-and-dry, copyright infringement.

Basically, the only way to stop people from copying your work is to destroy it before uploading it, which kinda' defeats the point.

On Photographic Reviews

This bring me to the second part of my rant: photographic review websites.

I can't even begin to describe how much they annoy the shit out of me. They seem to protect their images from their reviews as though they're worth their weight in gold.

Unfortunately, they truly are worth their weight in gold. Zero. It drives me up a wall when the shites... Freudian typo... sites put up their cropped images at JPEG 50. I don't five a shit what the image looks like in JPEG 50! Give me the goddamn RAW files! Give me .png files or JPEG 100's! I'm interested in THE CAMERA, not how good Photoshop is at compressing fucking JPEGs!

Give me the rawest image you can, so I can make my decision. That's why I'm going to your website. It doesn't matter if I found your image elsewhere, eventually I'm going to go get it directly from the horses mouth, because the creation of new work is always valuable. I want it new, when you write, as quickly as possible. As such, I'm going to be at your doorstep waiting for you to publish.

I found out about DPreview.com from a message board. Someone had copied all of these images. He didn't give any credit. He barely typed anything. I asked from whence the images came. Someone on the board said they looked like they came from DPReview. If that guy had not STOLEN their work, I might have never known about them. I now visit DPReview once a week and have purchased camera equipment via their links.

I don't mean to pick on DPReview. If anything, they're the best site on the net when it comes to not being idiots with their photos. They provide raw files, full-size jpegs, and tons of interactive images. No surprise, then, that they're the biggest camera review site on the net. (Seriously, they're fantastic. Go there)

But DPR is the exception. Even big websites like Cnet, don't give you anything. Go here to view the gallery of Nikon D3 photos. I've also ripped one from them.

How the FUCK are you supposed to determine anything from that? Give me the whole damned image or don't freaking bother! At the resolutions they're using, it would be impossible to tell the difference between the D3 and a camera that costs one-third as much.

If you're producing a product, namely art or a review, do everything you can to produce the best product and get me to spend money. Acting like some artistic miser gets you nothing, and writing a review for a camera that NO ONE who can afford it will ever read are not the ways to go about it.