Zoos are important for study and breeding purposes. If they make visitors more aware of their world, then I am all for them. Toronto zoo is a fantastic huge place where animals have a fair amount of room, though a big cat is still in a prison even if their cage is one kilometre square. That saddens me, but the kangaroo soon cheer me up.

I am with John on this one. I photograph what is right under my nose, where I live, in my milieu. By doing so I hope to focus the viewer's attention on their place in the environment they create.

Exotic animals I love to see, no doubt. But a photo I take will look just like all the rest and won't say anything about either me or the animal in question.

Yet I did not make the same assumptions because the data was different. That's the way cognition works.

We don't need to wait for a camera to come out to make certain assumption based on a) price, b) physics. It's obvious how the Q will work out -- give or take a little wiggle room -- given the sensor size, which is significantly smaller than even other point and shoot cameras. And it's massively smaller than a MFT or APS-C sensor.

The Q is a toy camera for people with too much money. Those in that bracket might well like it. The rest of us will call it like it is.

This is a smash and grab cash cow product. A shame Hoya didn't spend the research money on something more useful to photographers. A short while ago I bought a MFT camera for less than one-quarter the price of this travesty. That's real world pricing for you.

The illusion of "objectivity" is a large part of the problem.

But on the subject of the DA12-24. It's a good lens, with OK build quality. I like it, even though it is a zoom. There are none better so I make do.


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For me it's the opposite: reviews are useless if they merely tell me what I already know or believe. Only those reviews that challenge my assumptions or fill in missing data points or provide new outlooks interest me.

(I just spent the last hour reading reviews of a book I am studying, for exactly this reason.)

There is no "purpose" to corruption, it is merely a value judgement placed on an entity that deviates from some (generally spiritual or philosophical) ideal.

If you pretend to perform an activity for one reason (love of photography) but instead do it for another (to make money from advertisers) they you risk being corrupted. It's not an all-or-nothing process, but it does become increasingly inevitable as the size of the organisation and its monetary requirements increase.

A single person writing articles on a blog may indeed be corrupt, if they mislead their readership or do not follow their stated ethical principles.

But perhaps "corrupt" is not the best word, since this implies that there is some pure ideal from which deviation can occur. Organisations that have no ethical principles in the first place cannot be corrupted, since they are amoral institutions. (To be clear, the principle of making money is not an ethical principle.) All corporations are amoral by definition, since they privilege the organisational entity above the social fabric that constitutes and supports it. Any ethical principles they may bring to bear are incidental.

One of the best parody posts in a while!

Unfortunately people often actually think this way.

Ha! Of course I was accused of exactly that in the tripod thread.

The difference is that a £500 tripod might last a lifetime. You don't need to keep researching new models and checking for upgrades. It. Simply. Works.

It would be a mistake to compare this item with a digital camera, since there might well be real technology benefits to be had with new models -- so long as one knows where they lie.

For example, it once made good sense to upgrade camera bodies to get increase megapixels, since this was reflected in image quality both printed and on-screen. But after the products hit about 6MP there were diminishing returns. Not to say you won't benefit from more megapixels, but it must be considered on a case-by-case basis. And maybe the investment is best made elsewhere... like a good tripod so each pixel is sharp!

The environment of commercial magazines is inherently biased towards consumption. Magazines need to find products for people to spend their money on, on a continuous and regular basis. They tend to judge each product against certain fixed criteria; if the product meets them, the reviewer approves it with a high mark. The result is a continuing stream of products with "buy" ratings that we are expected to purchase.

Commercial reviewers tend to hide their criteria, hide their biases, obscure the economies in which they work and encourage rampant consumption of products simply because they are the next item on the agenda of a marketing department somewhere. Unfortunately so do most reviewers on blogs and community forums, because they have bought into this world view and internalised it.

Market forces work through systematic means to ensure conformity of opinion. Thus I am even more sceptical of the "general drift" of opinion than I am of one particular idiosyncratic outlook.