Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/08/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>From: AppleMac97@aol.com [mailto:AppleMac97@aol.com] >So if you never see a review of a >certain camera or lens, you can assume that their tests showed >it to be a >poor quality product, and that they decided not to publish it. > >Muhammad Chishty All well and good, except that you can't distinguish between products that don't get reviewed because they stink, and products that don't get reviewed because they magazine doesn't have infinite resources. One probably doesn't want to wait for Pop Photo to publish a review of the 400/4.0 configuration of the modular Telyt system, for example. The only thing you can say is that products that have been reviewed will probably not let you down too badly, as long as your expectations of performance are congruent with those of the editors. A technique I use to help me decide if a (camera, lens, car, toaster) is worth buying, might be called clustering. This is otherwise known as "ask everybody you know and see what they say". Gather all the info you can about the object under question, assign a weight to each opinion, test or review, and do an informal averaging of the results. The internet has made this a very interesting exercise, as you can get a zillion opinions on anything in no time at all, each of unknown validity. But, if 1000 people say "it sucks" and only 10 say "it worked OK for me", you probably have enough information to form an opinion - even if all 1010 respondants were complete loons. If you can back this up with one or two sources of known value like, say, Erwin and Ted (and Pop Photo :-), you've got a pretty sure foundation for making a decision. Paul