Friday, September 4, 2009

Review of digital camera reviews

Many photography enthusiasts with limited budget (like myself) would have come across the difficult task of deciding a suitable camera for themselves if they were serious in getting right value for the money spent and their requirements satisfied in medium to long term.

In this cyber-era, the Internet is filled with information on almost every topic. So, obviously those people search and browse for information about cameras on the Internet, where sites of digital-camera-reviews play a major role. Yet, there are few tricks to extract somewhat reliable information from the huge information bases.

The following are some of my observations about digital camera review sites on the web.
  1. Many sites only reproduce the feature list provided by the manufacturer under the name "review", which does not satisfy viewers' expectations.
  2. Some sites provide only the positive sides of particular products (probably biased or not written by experienced reviewer(s) )
  3. A good review should include both the pros and cons of cameras, how they perform under different conditions or use-cases with sample outputs, ergonomics of the camera, important features, comparable models from the same or other brands, and comparisons. 
In my view there is no camera which is perfect in every sense and probably no single camera would provide all the features we expect. In most cases, the higher the price the lesser the short comings.

Therefore, I always look for at least few reviews which provide both positive and negative sides of products. Then I decide whether those negative sides would really affect my area of photography interest. After deciding one or few models with the knowledge gain from the web and the advices obtained from friends, I look for users' comments and criticisms about the product(s) from blogs and/or forums.

By doing all these researches, I satisfy myself that I do not spent my money arbitrarily just because I am crazy in photography.

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