[kwb]

I bought a used book in Japan titled "New Face Clinic Pentax Selections", a compilation of Pentax-related review articles from Asahi Camera magazine.

The first "New Face Clinic" article in this book originally appeared in September 1957 issue, so it was almost exactly 65 years ago, and it was about Asahi Pentax (AP) and Takumar 58mm F2. (Apparently that was the second "New Face Clinic" article in the magazine's history. I don't know what the first installment was about except that it wasn't Pentax.) Anyway, I found the spirit and the style of the reviews of yesteryear refreshing and wanted to share.

The thing that really struck me the most is that they passed the review to the manufacturer before publishing and gave the manufacturer a proper space to respond in the review article itself. FYI, in the 4th photo, to the left of the vertical black bar (which reads "Q: The manufacturer answers") is the space for Pentax to respond, and they had a lot of explanations and rebuttals including but not limited to Pentax's own measurement of Takumar 58mm's edge resolution in lines/mm which was much better than the magazine's measurement. What kind of revolutionary idea is that? I wonder why nobody does that these days. It should still be possible to say e.g. "hey, we found some positives and some negatives about your product, here's the report, we'll publish it as is but if you have anything to say we can include that in the same article".


Also, each "Clinic" review is co-authored by 3 to 7 "Doctors" who were professionals in various fields, not the editors of the magazine, using cameras and lenses purchased for the review purpose. They were photographers, optical and mechanical engineers, professors, repairpersons etc., performing mechanical, optical and operational tests and analyses. In this specific review, there were four "Doctors", and one of them was Ihei Kimura, a photographer who should have been already famous in Japan at the time.






These "Doctors" carefully thought about their influence on readers. In the end of the AP review, they had to add this: "From this Clinic on, unlike the previous one, we won't grade cameras by scores any more. The score, which is just for one specimen, could be perceived by the readers as our evaluation of the entirety of the camera model. From readers' feedback, we thought that many seem to just use the score to make judgment without reading the article carefully. In addition, some Doctors had to wonder if we would be arrogant [to grade the camera]. But we still criticize negatives in the article as much as we used to, so please read with that in mind." That sounds really sensible, doesn't it?

If this were a modern day media outlet, they'd probably say "Great, the higher our score, the more readers will buy. How do we monetize this?". Maybe the editors might say "Why do we hire professionals to make expensive evaluations? Seems like we can just make an arbitrary score and people will still follow us."

The last camera reviewed in the book is MZ-7 in Dec/1999. The format and the spirit of "New Face Clinic" review continued at least up to that point.

BTW, the publisher of the magazine was Asahi Shinbun, one of the major news papers in Japan, thus their camera magazine was titled Asahi Camera (which sadly ceased to exist in a magazine format last year). No relation to Asahi Kogaku nor Pentax. After all Asahi means morning Sun or rising Sun, no surprise there are multiple unrelated Asahi-something companies.

Well, that's it. I hope that some of you found this interesting enough.

[Paul the Sunman]

Everything today is about metrics, not nuance. I don't think it would catch on. Pity.

[JPT]

It’s sad that Asahi Camera closed. I got the last issue for posterity, but it wasn’t the greatest. I was a more frequent reader of Nippon Camera myself.

In the case of Asahi Canera I heard that they were not getting enough advertising to continue - as low as 6 pages for the 200 pages of the magazine. At the end they mentioned that Asahi Camera may live on in some form as part of the Aera magazine group, but I haven’t seen any sign of that yet.

The compendium of old reviews you found is really nice to have. I never thought to look for that kind off think in the used book shops.