Re: Photography on Television

On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 10:57:12 +0100, michael adams wrote:

"pete" <no-one@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:slrnh5gkg3.3sd.no-one@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:22:46 -0700 (PDT), Mike Hall wrote:

I had a look around and though there are some excellent websites, they
are limited in the way a national television programme would not be:
the camera companies don't respect them enough to send items for
review, hence the reviewers are limited to people who can buy their
own items.

This is a good thing IMHO. If a website or magazine or TV programme
was dependent on suppliers to provide them with products, there is
always going to be marketing pressure to review them favourably, in
order not to sour the relationship (which is definitely one-sided).

A couple of the magazines I flicked through were just
insane or corrupt, giving good marks for the Canon SX200i for example,
the camera which I exposed as fatally flawed near the start of the
thread.

Anyway, if I may direct this thread, could the constructive comments
continue? I'm getting interested in starting something off myself, if
I could be convinced that this is a winning idea, which I'm not quite.

Maybe www.gdgt.com will become useful in the future. Briefly this is a
recently launched website where owners are able to brag about, ask about
and review the gadgets they have bought. It's hopelessly american (so
product lines may be different) and seems to attract fanboys and therefore
"shiney" gadgets, but maybe with a bit of help they can mature into something
sensible.



There are a few real problems with consumer reviews.

The first is that there's a recognised cognitive mechanism -
positive re-inforcement IIRR - which causes consumers to single out the good
points in anything they've splashed out a lot of money for. Psychologically
speaking people try and reinforce the soundness of their decisions after the event.
As many such decisions are always based on unknowns - they're all a bit of a gamble
its necessary for people to believe they're going to make correct
decisions in the future - hence the reinforcement of their past ones.
Otherwise they'd just stop functioning.

Yup, cognitive dissonance - gottit.

Another big problem seems to be buyers complaining about design features they
should already have known about when they bought the camera.

The other is that in all product lines there's always going to be a small
percentage of defective items produced . Regardless of quality control
Human nature being what it is. However in saying this its impossible for me to
say what that percentage might be in any particular case. Now the point is until
the advent of the net nobody knew apart from shop assistants and the manufacturers
themselves except maybe readers of hobby magazines what this percentage actually was.
i.e Uncle Clive's notorious returns percentages etc. Nowadays however it seem that
if anyone gets a "dog" they'll be screaming blue murders all over
the Internet within days and this will snowball. Other purchasers with seeming
"dogs" - often novices purchasing over-featured equipment they can't understand
then get in on the act and before you know it, Nikon it seems have been churning
out junk for the past 3 months

In reality for most users there's not much to choose between any of the major
manufacturers. In terms of features of particular models there are usually workarounds
and humans are infinitely adaptable. Where lenses are concerned the differences
are usually at the edges which can usually be cropped off - and thus allowed
for in the original shot in any case. Although obviously if you want to be able
to shoot largish objects from say only a few feet away without too much distortion
then you'll need to do your homework before reaching for the credit card.


michael adams

Indeed. if you really want a wake-up call on just how poor (most) lenses are, try using
one for astronomical shooting. Even most multi-hundred pound primes suffer from coma,
false-colour, distortion to a remarkable degree. As for zooms, well ......
Fortunately, in those circles, the small number of truly good lenses is well known.
.

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