Originally posted by ffking maybe DPR isn't as objective as t should be - and the usual suspect trolls are getting no traction - people talking about not buying camera gear from Amazon: Maybe it's too much to hope that a tide has turned, but there is something different in the air.
I guess we can always hope that the tide will turn. The fact is, I don't think the notion of having an independent so-called "objective" review site associated with a store like Amazon is a good idea. Cameras gear, especially lenses, have to be judged in terms of the images they produce, and the images themselves can only be judged aesthetically, which means "subjectively." The tendency with these review sites — not just DPR — is for them to be dominated by nerds who worship technology like it's some kind of religion and who believe that only what can be measured is fully real or significant. Now the fact is, people with that kind of mentality are never going to give Pentax a fair shake. Pentax has never been about worshipping technology for its own sake or producing lenses that only achieve numerical goals but are otherwise without merit. If you go over to the pentax.com site or their lens catalog, they're constantly reiterating this message that technological and numerical goals must be balanced by sensory and aesthetic goals. "PENTAX engineers are always working toward the realization of images that are rich in detail and gradation; achieving this goal often means valuing sensory evaluations over numerical evaluations." "Realizing the ideal imaging concept included extremely detailed activities, because PENTAX places as much importance on the human perception of beauty as the company does in numerical evaluations." "In the age of advanced technologies, PENTAX still places great importance on human sensibilities,
something that is in complete opposition to much of today’s technological advancement. For PENTAX, this is the primary source for attaining exceptional image quality. Achieving this goal requires a large number of actual images capturing different types of subjects, and taken in varying photographic conditions. Among the PENTAX engineers are a group of photo enthusiasts specializing in such fields as portraiture, landscape and astronomical photography. Every weekend, they take test models out into the field, and shoot photographs without attracting people’s attention to the models that are still under development. In fact, this has become routine work for them." This is not, as some skeptics might suggest, a cynical marketing ploy. Jun Hirakawa pretty much indicated a similar outlook in his white paper on the FA 77 published nearly twenty years ago. Pentax cameras and lenses manifest a specific philosophy that essentially challenges the views that tend to prevail at places like DPR. Now while the reviewers at DPR may not consciously understand or know what Pentax's philosophy is, this very lack of knowledge makes it impossible for them to appreciate a lens like the DFA* 50. They can only judge the lens on its technical merits. They are blind to the lens' non-measurable excellences — to its bokeh, its rendering, its transitions from object to background, from in focus to out of focus, its ability to portray a sense of depth, etc. etc. Since these things can't be measured, they don't exist for the DPR reviewers. This is one of the many challenges Pentax is facing — that they find themselves in opposition to this nihilistic scientism/positivism that prevails within the reviewer community.