When the e5 is released and those early adopters are in this forum informing us of it's pros and cons and we ask for an image sample from this camera, do we then leave and head off to the fourthirds image forum check and then come back? Why should we do this? We are discussing cameras and cameras take photos not cook food, how very bizarre.
Sorry LouHolland, I'm not trying to be rude to you and I'll assume your question is sincere but I'm bemused why people would take exception to photos being posted in a photography forum, this has to be one of the strangest things when you consider there is a forum for almost everything on the internet and the ideal tool used in these forums be it motorcycles, sports, crafts or history etc is a photo to demonstrate the topic or content of discussion.
Actually, if I may presume, I think Lou Holland is in favor of "gratuitous" photography in a gear forum.
Technically, DPR requests that people only postiimages in a gear forum to illustrate a technical point:
http://www.dpreview.com/forums/rules.asp?forum=1022
Please use "Samples & Galleries" - We encourage our users to embed image links into their text, however if you're simply posting a link to your favourite picture or your latest gallery we'd ask you to post this in the Samples & Galleries forum
and it is a rule that you don't post "many" (whatever "many" means) pics in a single post:
Posting many pictures - Do not post many pictures in one message, instead post a link to a gallery. Posting several messages with just one image in each in a short period will be treated as SPAM - it will be deleted.
However, either of these would result in Ilya V posting his pics elsewhere (or Donald Chin before he left), or not at all, and that would be a terrible shame.
The fact is that one can learn a lot about the gear from "gratuitous" pics. That is, gratuitous images serve a technical purpose even if the OP just wants to share their pics. For example, if you see that pics are always displayed at a small size, it might tell you something about the IQ of the system. If you see lots of wildlife pics, it might tell you that a lot of wildlife photographers like that system. If you see lots of macro, it might tell you that the system is well suited for macro. And so on.
So, speaking for myself, I am not a fan of either the suggestion or the rule. But what I do think is a nice courtesy is when beginning a thread with lots of pics, to post the pics in the reply to the OP, rather than the OP itself (I've been guilty of flubbing that one on more than one occasion, unfortunately).
It's really quite simple -- if you don't want to look at gratuitous pics, don't look. If you don't want to read tech threads, don't. Not only should that be fairly easy to do based on the thread title (although some do like to be deceptive on occasion to lure people in), but DPR's image icon next to the thread helps even further.
In fact, the View Tab allows makes it even easier with three choices:
- All threads
- Exclude threads with images
- Only threads with images
However, it's not perfect -- I've seen threads with images in the OP with no icon. And, even then, it doesn't inform the viewer of images within the thread. OK, so nothing's perfect -- what else is new?
In other words, I vote for pics to be posted, whether to support a technical point, or just to share.
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