camera reviews

[Fall]

Is it just me, or are all Steve's reviews positive? I love the accessibility of information on this site, but after seeing dozens of "Steve's Conclusion" pages, I'm wondering if any of them say "this camera is no good," or even "X model from last year is $100 cheaper and just as good."

Does Steve ever criticise anything?

[JimC]

You didn't look very hard at the conclusions then.

You'll see things like noise, image quality indoors and outdoors, barrel and pincushion distortion, flash usability, chromatic aberrations, AF speed/usability, and more discussed in most reviews.

[gadgetnut]

I have to agree with JimC. I think Steve does a good job of pointing out a camera's weak points while praising its strong points. Let's face it, very few (if any) of the new digicams are going to be total junk. They will each have good and bad points. A good reviewer knows how to pointthese out without appearing biased. He gives the facts and lets YOU decide which of the camera's features are important to YOU. I like that.

[JohnG]

In addition to pointing out pros and cons, what I feel is useful for a reviewer to do is compare a camera to it's 'competition' and attempting to draw conclusions regarding where camera A is better than B and vice versa. Otherwise you run the risk of magazine style reviews. Not that I recommend them for photography equipment but I like the approach of Consumer Reports. Develop a list of categories and rate each product in those various categories, then rank them (yes the ranking is subjective but you also see how they rate in each category). The idea being you can look at things as a chart - kind of l ike you can do for the specs -e.g. you can chart out 5 cameras and say Camera 1 is 8mp, Camera 2 is 6mp, Camera 3 is 10mp etc. Well, now I'm saying for some of the subjective categories (ergoomics, noise performance, sharpness) - apply some sort of rating that allows a user to chart out how those 5 cameras perform. The way reviews are, if you're reading a review from a year ago, the review could say the camera is great from a sharpness standpoint. Now a year later the bar is raised and we still say camera B is Great at being sharp. In reality camera B is sharper than A because they weren't being graded on the same scale.

It would be nice to have a comparison every X months of the 'top 5' cameras by category (Steve currently has his best list - so maybe you just compare the cameras in those lists). So, now you get someone who believes performance at High ISO is the ultimate criteria - look at the chart and only consider cameras rated tops in high ISO performance. Which is how people use Consumer Reports.

Just something to consider.

[Fall]

It's certainly true that Steve comes across as un-biased. It wouldn't be wrong for him toinclude inhis conclusions on Sony productsa line about the Memory Stick format, to the effect that these cards cost significantly more than SD cards of comparable capacity and read/write speed. But I guess he doesn't want to alienate Sony-lovers.

[JimC]

Fall wrote:

It's certainly true that Steve comes across as un-biased. It wouldn't be wrong for him toinclude inhis conclusions on Sony productsa line about the Memory Stick format, to the effect that these cards cost significantly more than SD cards of comparable capacity and read/write speed. But I guess he doesn't want to alienate Sony-lovers.

Picky, aren't we? ;-)

Media is usually not a high percentage of a camera's cost, given the card sizes most users of these models are going to buy. 1 GB cards are very inexpensive now.

Keep in mind that Sony is one of the largest manufacturers of digital cameras in the world (they usually place in the top 3 in market share, with very little difference between Sony, Canon, and Kodak's percentage of digital cameras sold worldwide).

You've also got Memory Stick media available from third party manufacturers like Sandisk and Lexar which helps to make the product more competitive.

The higher end models where you'll find more users that need higher card capacity often support more than one media type, too. For example, the DSC-F828 and DSC-R1 support CompactFlash media as well as Memory Stick).

I do see Steve gripe about Xd PictureCard from time to time. I checked his latest Olympus review, and didn't notice it there. He mentions it in the forums from time to time.

Interestingly, I dd see some comments from Steve like these in the last Olympus review conclusion, recommending alternatives to this model because of image quality. If a camera is below average compared to other models in it's class, Steve usually makes sure to point that out in a review's conclusion section.

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2006_...fe140_pg5.html

Bottom line - Olympus' FE-140 may be appealing because of its under-$180 street price, but its image quality leaves a lot to be desired. If low price is a major consideration and you can tolerate slow shooting performance, I would even suggest the FE-115 as a better alternative. If quality and performance matter and price is of less concern, find an additional $30-40 in your budget and get something on the order of a Canon PowerShot A610 or Sony CyberShot W30. Both offer much better performance and image quality, and include a far superior movie mode with sound.