About Camera Reviews
May 10th 2007Wallabynerd alert
One of the gadgets I’ve enjoyed most over the past few years has been a digital camera. (Two of them, actually - first an Olympus D-380, then a Canon A85.) I always liked taking pictures as a kid, but film costs kept it as a “special occasion” thing only. Now there’s no such restriction.
Of course, the downside of having a camera is that you wind up having a lot of pictures. Pictures which have to be organized, because otherwise you’ll never find them again. Pictures which can wind up duplicated. And all that takes time - either my time or a computer’s time, and computers don’t seem to be terribly good at it. (Although apparently there’s progress - Riya is a new service which claims to recognize features in photos and label them to match. And digikam has a “find duplicates” plugin, although it’s neither fast nor 100% effective.)
The other downside is that, when you have a camera, it’s easy to want a better one. For instance, to replace one’s A85 with the A570. Better sensor, better processing, longer zoom range, image stabilization, and it’s still compatible with the adapter mount from my A85. *coughs*
Of course, before one gets such a camera, one wants to read reviews. Reviews which confirm that it really is the best camera of that size and type and price range. Or even better, reviews which pick it apart and find the dark lining of the silver cloud. (At least, I hope it’s got a dark lining. All kinds of stray-light problems if not…)
And that’s the difficulty - there really don’t seem to be any really critical camera review sites out there. There’s some, such as Steve’s Digicams which give a comprehensive tour of the features. DC Resource page even gives a handy comparison to other Powershot models, and a nice list of the less-than-stellar areas. (Apparently the big one is noise at high ISO, which virtually everything has a problem with, except (apparently) some Fuji models. But the Fuji models aren’t so hot otherwise, definitely worse than the Canon in good light.) And they recommend some rivals to compare it to - but then they don’t review any of those. Sigh.
Then again, it’s a nice change from “reviews” like this one at Tom’s Hardware. Somehow these always sound much more like “I just got a new camera and so I’ll ‘review’ it by going through the feature list”. (Strange for a site which does much more thorough reviews of other hardware, like processors.) I guess what would really be nice is a comparison like they do for video cards.
Anyone got some better review sites? especially the comparative approach?