One trick pony Locked

DMillier wrote:

Let's take a balanced view here. All sigmas I've used have been more or less the worst cameras around in their classes as all round cameras. It isn't anything to do with inept users either, the cameras are deficient in many ways and that hardly changes from model to model. Reviewers who test the cameras with the same mindset they apply to other cameras are usually scathing. And rightly so, the blame for this is not the reviewers but sigma engineers.

The people who most enthusiastic about sigmas make excuses for the shortcomings. And I that is the point, if you like the foveon output, you have to excuse the rest of the camera because they stack up poorly against almost anything else. Huge improvements in camera performance would be welcome I'm sure even by some of the most diehard hair shirt ers here but we know that isn't going to happen so we have to grit our teeth and make the best of it. It is a one trick pony but if you value what it does above al else you just have to put up with it.

So, David, with all due respect, you have presented the negative side of the balance well without addressing my basic premise: Every device (and I really mean EVERY DEVICE) has a learning curve and no device (and I mean NO DEVICE) accomplishes anything close to approaching everything.

For instance, I read a review of one of Porsche's street-legal race cars, in which the review chalked up the lack of air conditioning - and thus a lot of noise with the windows rolled down (as much as you could) on a hot summer's day, all the while ignoring the fact that the decibel level from that race engine back there was far louder than any wind noise short of a tornado.

There were masses of reviews panning the Yugo when it was sold in the States. How terrible it was in virtually every respect, blah, blah, blah . . . The Yugo was built for then Yugoslavia's backroads as an inexpensive form of transportation for people who could barely afford it. To hold it up to some other standard relating to Interstate speeds, potholes, and Minnesota winter driving ignores the device, imposes a bias, and trashes something that might have had many buyers, who also could not afford (in every respect) even a Pinto at the time.

I have a long list of these things, but I will stop here. I think you get that part of my point.

Since Sigma have been making cameras, each new one gets trashed and praised and damned with faint praise by the usual suspects upon release. Then there is a sorting out phase as some knuckleheads, including moi, set out to figure out what it CAN do before the CAN'T do message settles in. This was the case with the SD9 and it was most recently with the SD1 and DPxMs. Remember the discussions about TOO SHARP and the related halos? Now we are all nostalgic for those bygone days. Poor Paulo never got beyond the SD9, bless his cones.

I have stated my approach long ago: Figure out what it can do; what it can't do will be left over and forgotten.