Athena said:
A good review in "Pop Photography"?
Wow, isn't that surprising (ironically speaking of course)?
Have you ever seen a bad review in Pop Photo?
That magazine is a bigger sl*t than Aphrodite! 🙄
BTW: anyone notice how the thread starter joined here in December - shortly after the M8 "problems" arose.
How many shills are on this site anyway?
Well, I guess we have to expect someone who sprang fully armored from Zeuss's brow to be a bit cranky. Talk about birth trauma!
Still, while I can't vouch for the original poster, I agree that it was a useful and frank review -- and I think I've been on here long enough and have posted enough stuff to qualify as NOT a shill.
As to "bad" (I assume you mean negative) reviews in
Pop Photo, well, I don't recall their ever saying something absolutely s*cks... but they've always said that if a camera just plain doesn't work or isn't minimally acceptable, they just don't publish a test on it. Yeah, you could say it would be more frank to publish a detailed review saying "The _____ was a piece of junk that didn't work to begin with and then fell apart"... but on the other hand, why waste magazine space on that? If they publish a test, you can assume that the camera is at least minimally usable, and if they don't, well, then, you're on your own.
And when you come right down to it, while I've seen lots of cameras with what I considered to be ill-conceived
features or indifferently-designed
controls, I can't think of any mainstream cameras I've owned or seen in recent years that were just plain unusable junk. We've come a long way from the days of the Finetta 99 or the Pigeon 35, for example -- cameras that either couldn't make a decent picture right out of the box, or were likely to break at any time.
In fact, I'd say the M8 review was one of the more tart ones I've read in
Pop in recent years. For those who haven't read it either in the magazine or on the website, they describe the camera, discuss how it works (warts and all -- they explicitly note such points as its lack of weather sealing, low magnification, and easily-smeared LCD), evaluate its performance both quantitatively and qualitatively (including a concise discussion of the IR, banding and ghosting issues and Leica's fixes for them) and then make a general conclusion.
It's in this concluding note especially that
Pop shows its backbone a bit, noting that the need for IR cutoff filters "raises a serious question" about the camera, and concludes that "at nearly $5,000 for just the M8 body, that question shouldn't have to be asked." I'd call that both fair and pretty darn astringent for a mainstream magazine!
