Photo Technique

[Mark_Bishop@ipc.co.uk]

David Morton <dmorton@cix.compulink.co.uk> wrote, speaking of Photo Technique
magazine:
>>>
I think there are two, one US based, one UK based.
<<<

This is true. I believe there's a magazine called Photo Techniques (plural?) in
the US and there's a bimonthly called Photo Technique (singular) in the UK. I
know because I work for IPC, the company that publishes it (I'm a kind of group
editorial troubleshooter/editorial director). In fact in the summer of 1995 I
was involved in 'relaunching' the magazine in its current format. So you know
who to mail with any complaints.
We also have the weekly Amateur Photographer magazine, which we redeveloped last
February. It carries plenty of camera news tests. The tech ed, Joel Lacey, was
famously anti-Leica until I cajoled him into testing it, at which point he
agreed that the optics possess that undefinable special quality of which we all
write.
Recently that magazine published a 24-ish page supplement entitled 'the Great
Lens Guide', which may interest LUG subscribers. The idea was simple: they
invited each camera maker and independent lens manufacturer to submit their best
optics in each category, so wideangle and tele zooms would be evaluated
separately from fixed focal-lengths. The lenses were bench-tested for high- and
low-contrast resolution, distortions etc to give an absolute score, and were
also given a relative ranking that took into account specification/value and
handling.
On the overall score, ie taking price into account, a 135mm Canon EF lens (I
believe the soft-focus one) came tops. But in absolute lens quality the winner
was the Leitz Summilux-M 35mm 1.4 Asph.
I can only speak for the UK in saying that our magazines are not slow to
criticise bad cameras. AP recently came in for a lot of stick (from readers,
more than its advertisers) for branding the Ukranian Kiev 'a turkey', more for
its lousy reliability record than its optical performance. Occasionally
advertisers will threaten to withdraw support if they are criticised heavily -
but that doesn't stop the magazine for telling it like it is.