Minutiae and other stupidity
23 March 2004: the crazies are starting to get their cameras in
foreign countries and trying to break them. People are pointing
them at blank walls and test patterns looking for every sort of
defect, and then of course anyone can post whatever minutiae on the
internet so all the normal people get worried, too.
Then normal people send me email asking for my opinion, so here it is.
Here's where wisdom comes in: personally I can break anything. I
know how to create test setups that can exploit just about any
imperfection. I do this when I get a new product so I know its
limits when I need to push it. As soon as I find the limits I get
over it and go make pictures. Everything has its limits if you know
how to find them.
I've shot with this camera and it works great. Want to see the sort
of things I shoot? Look here.
Some people, the measurebators, never get over this. Their fetish
is to find something technical first so they feel smarter than you.
They aren't photographers. Face it, there has never been a perfect
camera yet. You can't just buy a different product that has all the
advantages of the one you own and also just magically fixes the few
limits you found. Guess what: that other product probably has far
more real problems.
The minor points measurebators find are invisible in photography.
The real issues, like how long does the battery last or if you can
find the power switch, are obvious so the measurebators get no kick
out of pointing them out. You want to see a camera obviously bottom
of the heap? Go look at the specs on the Sigma SD-10. Measurebators
do this fault finding as a hobby, just as archeologists and
astronomers love to find hidden things. Measurebators are not
photographers, so if you want to make pictures you can safely
ignore them.
Inscrutable Oriental Warm-Cool 1/8,000 Shutter Syndrome (IOWCSS)
18 March 2004: Also in the category of minutiae I got an email from
the Orient that someone thinks that at 1/8,000 of a second at ISO
200 he's seeing a very minor color balance shift from one side of
the image to the other.
From the images I saw it's invisible, even if the images really are
showing the performance of the camera and not just some artifact of
his test method. I have no idea who the source is or how the photos
were made.
Even if the images I saw are really showing the D70's performance,
it was still invisible so who cares?
1.) I couldn't see the purported shifts unless I cranked the
saturation to +100 in Photoshop. These shifts, even if a true
artifact of the D70, are irrelevant for photography.
2.) No one really shoots above 1/1,000 anyway, and certainly not
down at ISO 200. The problem supposedly is at 1/4,000 and 1/8,000
at ISO 200. The only time I even use 1/2,000 or above is so I can
deliberately shoot a lens wide open in daylight to look for flaws.
To shoot at 1/4,000 or 1/8,000 you'd have to be shooting in broad
daylight at f/2.8 at ISO 200, and only time you'd do that is for
portraits in which case you'd have scrims to reduce the light
levels so you wouldn't be using 1/4,000 anyway. If you did shoot in
broad daylight the light would be so harsh that the subtle effects
of the Inscrutable Oriental Warm-Cool 1/8,000 Shutter Syndrome
(IOWCSS) would be invisible, and if the light got soft you'd have
to use a longer speed at which the IOWCSS no longer is reported by
its discoverers. This could be an artifact of the electronic
shutter, which as you've read above is CRITICAL to the 1/500 flash
sync that photographers really do use. I'd rather get 1/500 sync
(which matters) and this purported color shift at 1/8,000 (which
doesn't matter) any day.
3.) Anybody can publish anything on the internet. I know I sure do.
So who cares? This seems like another case of analysis paralysis or
measurebation. As I said at the very top one can always find
nitpicks with anything and, even if true, isn't worth worrying
about. For instance, a lens or filter with sloppy coating like you
might get in a non-Nikon lens could cause this.
for full details, read here :-
http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d70.htm
