How I Review

  • I post reviews of my old gear that are short and easy to read.
  • I tend to put some real-world mileage into the gear I write about, never less than 2,000 (and at times up to 100,000) shots across multiple outings.
  • All my reviews feature real world (e.g., not created for the sake of reviewing) images, all taken by me.
  • I don’t indend to repeat the technical reviews that are available for most cameras from DPReview or other great sites.
  • The reviews are not at all comprehensive, and cover only my typical use cases, which I think represent fairly well the average hobby photographer’s needs. I do a fair amount of menu-digging, but don’t get to the depth of every camera customization with each of my cameras.
  • I share personal impressions on the pro and con side, and then draw my personal conclusions, based on real-world use of the camera, in a modern setting (Lightroom, AI denoise are all in play), being fully aware of what modern cameras can do, but not ignoring the release date of the gear at hand. So I won’t rave about ISO3200 being usable on a retro camera, but also won’t beat up a camera from 2001 because it can’t record 4K video.
  • I’m not a professional and I don’t have access to the latest pro-grade equipment. My reviews are therefore skewed towards enthusiastic standards. This includes AF performance, lens sharpness and contrast, etc. Take my judgement accordingly.
  • I shoot RAW, and every picture that you see is processed to my taste. I don’t think that color science matters that much in the RAW world or certain sensor tech is better than another, that said, the naive Lightroom workflow (just importing your images, without color corrections) can lead to markedly different results from different camera / lens combinations. I understand you can get to very similar results with relative ease, but I still value a camera based on the default import into Lightroom (or RawTherapee, if it has better demosaicing for a given camera), where the camera’s white balance and color information cooked into RAW serve as the basis for my edits.