Tech Tuesday: How to read equipment reviews

First an admission, I’m a photo gear tech-no-nerd. I love photography and I love the gear. I spend way too much time researching and studying it. Well, maybe that’s what I’m paid to do, but I still find myself obsessed with it. This will be an entry to try and help you not fall into my trap, and help me climb out of it.

Let’s start by setting a few important ground rules:

1. Cameras and lenses are made to make “PICTURES”, not be tested (o.k. it’s alright to test them, but that’s not their prime focus in life – sorry for the pun, I know that was lame…..). O.K. got that off my chest. It is natural to want to know all the details about the equipment that we trust to help us make images. It’s also reasonable that with money in short supply, (for most of us), we want to invest it wisely. All good reasons to want to know as much as we can about the gear we plan to buy.
2. For any photographer, one of the most valuable things he or she can have, is to have confidence in their gear, once we feel our gear can do anything we need it to do, we will stop thinking about the gear, (a good thing), and start thinking about making photographs (a great thing). Remember the image, is the final goal…….
3. If you’re going to invest a considerable sum in cameras and lenses, you might as well get the ones that will work great for you, and keep working for a long time.

O.K. I read reviews frequently from Thom Hogan http://bythom.com/ and Ken Rockwell http://www.kenrockwell.com/ and I am a frequent visitor to DP Review http://www.dpreview.com/
I also read reviews written by most of the major magazines, Popular Photography in particular.
By-the-way, I think Thom Hogan is very good photographer as well, I tend to trust his thoughts because he actually uses the gear, himself. Though I often agree with their evaluations I sometimes have a different take on them as well. I’m not suggesting they are wrong, but that I have a different way of interpreting the results they are reporting.

What I hope to learn from a review is trends. If I read ten reviews of a new camera, take the D7000 for instance, I think the overall response to the product will reveal a lot. Since you know, if you come here often, I’m in love with the D7000, naturally I wondered how it was getting reviewed. I printed off ten reviews from online yesterday and then thoroughly read all of them.
The bottom line was that all of the reviews gave the camera very strong marks, not a surprise to me. The interesting difference in the reviews was how they saw the High ISO noise performance.
All the reviews gave it good marks, but a couple thought it was not as good as some of the others
claimed they had determined. How can this be? It’s easy, different reviewers see that one function of a camera as more or less important than another reviewer. Another thing is the experience of the reviewer with other cameras. When I shoot the D7000 for a few days I see not serious problem with noise in the High ISO range (for me up to 1600 ISO). However, if I use the D3s for a day or two, the noise in the D7000 doesn’t impress me as much as it did, standing alone. The D3s is a fully professional DSLR made for speed and low light performance. It truly is not fair to compare a $1,200. mid range DSLR to a $5,000+ Pro DSLR. When asked what the extra $3,800. dollars buys you, that’s one of the answers. Does that make the D7000 less of a camera? Not for me. I just know if I must shoot at 6400, I’m going to be happier with the images from a D3s. I find the D7000 easy to cary, very responsive, and I think in 98% of my photographic situations, it delivers superb results.

The reason I bring this up is that the new website, coming soon, will have a Tech Talk section where I will review and evaluate gear and compare gear. My reviews will be just as likely to show my own prejudices as do all the other reviewers. I will try to maintain a very unbiased stance, but we are all human and our leanings slip into everything we do. I will state up front my parameters, and how I see the review process, which I hope will at least clarify my remarks.

The bottom line is that we all need a good place to go and get, honest, factual information about our photo gear questions. I’m hopeful that when I get started in this venture you will enjoy joining me, just as you do reading the thoughts of the other reviewers.

The image above was chosen for a reason, and you’ve seen it many months ago when I posted it the first time. Some time back I got an email request from the New York offices of Nikon to make some images with the 18-55 AF-S kit lens, for a brochure. To be honest, I had not ever used the lens. It came on some of our less expensive DSLRs and because it is a lighter duty lens, I had set it aside and used lenses I had more experience with. I took the lens out and Jim Begley took me to a neat place to do some testing. When I downloaded the images and started to edit them, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I even checked the EXIF data to be sure the shot was really made with the little 18-55! Sure enough, it was, and I sat down to a big slice of humble pie. I got one more lesson in the field of, “don’t assume you know everything”, category.

Testing can be valuable to establish just what your equipments capabilities are. Once you know you have no excuses. if a camera and lens once made a technically wonderful shot, the process should be reproducible, if you use great technique and work carefully…………

So read, study, test, evaluate and once your settled, go shoot some great images!!!!!!! I’ve said it before, but this might be a good time to repeat it, “If you’re shooting any of the current better cameras out there today, and you’re not getting spectacular results, it’s probably not the camera…….”

God bless,

the pilgrim

*Photo Note: D90 with the 18-55 AF-S VR kit lens. Reminds me why I loved the D90 so much.

He is no fool who gives that which he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.  Jim Elliot
Great quote sent to me form Rodney Smith

O.K. let’s kick this off right, This is my first comparison test. Here is the premise, I love the D7000 and the D3s and i know without running a test that the D3s is the better camera to keep noise down when shooting at high ISO. But, how much better is the D3s really? There is one way to find out, let’s run a test.

Everyone has their own definition of what a “big” print is. For me my normal big print is a 24X36 so that is the size I blew the files up to then pull out a small piece to compare. Look closely at the first image and remember it is a file blown up to 24” X 36” I then went in on a very small portion of that rather large size print to check noise, here goes;

O.K. I’m thinking the same thing you are, I can’t tell anything yet, so lets really go in really radically and see what we can see. The picture above shows the new tiny, tiny crop. I took each file and enlarged it again to 24 X 36, it was, remember, a crop of only 6X8 inches, So now this is a crop from a print bigger than 4 X 6 Feet!

Alright, finally we can see some things to make some assumptions from. Yes the D7000 has more noise than the D3s, wow, big surprise, but, it’s not really relevant until you get to ISO 1600. From then on up it definitely shows up. One thing that does show up, that I didn’t expect, is that the 16.2 mega pixels of the D7000 definitely has more bite than the 12.1 of the D3s. So what am I saying, the resolution of the D7000 will make images look crisper at almost any size, if some minor noise is not your cup of tea, the D3s will still probably make you happier and remember we are only talking about noise, if a big buffer and lots of frame rate are on your need list the D3s is definitely your camera.

But if you don’t make really big prints on a regular basis, don’t need a camera you could drive nails with (meaning super, super tough build), or 9 frames per second, the D7000 would make you a really happy camper.

* I hope this kind of report will be helpful to you, this is what’s coming in October with www.billfortney.com.

Lens used for the test was the 35mm f 1.8 DX. All images were shot hand held. My goal is to make all my tests, real world, the way we actually make images, warts and all……..