Another issue in Thom Hogan GF1 review

staneC wrote:

In real life, that would be important ... where? How can this ruin one's picture? There is always some dust somewhere, that do something. Don't get me wrong. I do have dust cleaning set to "ON" on my D90 and sometimes I remove dust with a blower. But that is it.

Your statements are essentially "if I can't see it, it doesn't exist." Different people have different tolerance levels and different visual training for that matter. I'm always amused when a workshop student submits something for review and I start pointing out things that they didn't see. They were perfectly happy with the picture before, but not after. I guess that makes me a big mean ogre. It also amuses me when people on the forums of the most nit-picking, pixel peeping site on the Internet start dismissing small, low-level issues. I'm not sure why those people are here.

Be that as it may. If you don't see it and you're convinced it doesn't exist, then it doesn't exist. But let me tell you a story about one fellow. He complained to me that his camera's sensor was failing. "I used to get crisp, clear color and details out of the camera, and now the sensor is giving me mush." I looked at the images he submitted as evidence. Indeed, there was a visible (though modest) difference between his first images with the camera and his current images. I asked to see the camera. And was met with the dirtiest sensor I've ever seen. It took me two hours to get it clean. And guess what, that modest visible loss was now gone.

People forget that these are tools that need to be treated like tools. They need periodic maintenance. Cleaning is one of those things that keep the tool in tip top shape and allow it to perform as intended.

Colors are very subjective.

Yes, they are. However, as I've pointed out many times, its more difficult to take complex shifts out of an image than put them into an image. If all you want is pleasing results, then, sure, pick the camera that produces them out of camera. If you want the best possible results--and most people following my site would fall into that category--you want "optimal data" not data that has things coded into it that are difficult to override.

[Subjective] Like Menus in a camera.

Actually, I'd argue that menus are not at all subjective. When we did UI designs in my many years in the tech business, we tested the UI in many, many ways. You can quantify the learning time, the minimum and maximum time to set something, and a whole bunch of other things. And I argue that such things make a huge difference in cameras. After all, we're trying to catch a specific moment in time, one that is often measured in hundredths of a second. Any lag, encumbrance, missed setting, etc., makes it less likely that you hit the optimal moment. There was a photo on the front of my site when my E-P1 review (lions at sunrise) that everyone liked but which I pointed out was not the best possible shot I could have taken. I missed the best possible shot because the camera slowed me down in some way (in this case, getting an accurate AF point). I don't want "good" shots. I want "best" shots possible. Anything, and that includes menus, that slows me down in doing that I'm going to complain about.

Personally, I think the camera makers have mostly just let menus grow and grow and grow as they add features. That's not the way to create an optimal tool.