Hi, a little rant on websites reviewing digital cameras follows... after reading several Reichmann's (www.luminous-landscape.com) "reviews", it seems to me he is overly uncritical to some products. I will not speculate on the cause of this, perhaps he has just different needs. But he is biased nevertheless, in my opinion. I am not talking about being paid by a brand or something (see Michael Johnson's recent SMP column for a funny read on that), but just that he reviews with total hype and PR style. PR which lot of times is for some product. That's not a review, that's PR, advertising, etc. The last is definitely DXO OpticsPro, an image enhancement program. In his review of this software (used to automatically correct distortion, lateral chromatic aberation and vignetting, something that was possible even before with freeware PanoramaTools but at the expense of long experimenting to find the proper parameters).
Well, to put it short, the DXO program has the parameters built-in for many combinations already. That is good. Bad thing is, the company (and review) present it as breaktrough innovation, when it is all something that was done thousand times before manually. That's just the marketing and PR bastards inventing new buzzwords in Dilbert's style. We all know PR & marketing people are like lawyers. That a reviewer participates in it is another thing. And he presents the results as "dramatic improvement in several aspects of image quality, and no visible negative affects at all" (see his review). What I see is dramatic oversharpened image and therefore resolution loss of smallest details. And this USM-like function is called Blur and they even invented their own "units" for it, BxU for sure! Now that's marketing "blursh*t" all over. Anyway, see the images for yourself. The original is much more pleasing and doesn't look oversharpened nor artifical, which the "corrected" image does. Nevertheless, the program seems to nicely correct distortion and chromatic aberation. But one could do that freely before with many tools, some more advanced, some less. Still, Reichmann speaks of it as a great achievement, dramatic improvement, etc... all using buzzwords that are inapropriate and "dramatic". In fact, he is right there doing PR for the product using typical PR strategies. It seems to me that there are not much good review sites. DPREVIEW is much much worse, with Phil Askey (career in computers and web, almost nothing with professional photography, and it can be seen in his reviews). But the general public, is probably satisfied. At least L-L focuses more on usage of cameras, although Reichmann still uses very strange statements at times. Good light, Frantisek Vlcek
