I think all the photographic magazines these days suffer from a serious lack of technical knowledge and there are less than a handful of reviewers world wide that can really master a MFDB and it's software on a level that allows them to be respected by their readers.
This is why occasionaly one reviewr will rave a product that other will trash and this is why they often miss the real pluses and/or minuses of the product.
We as manufacturers are somehow stuck in the middle, between photographers who want to buy the product and can be mislead by one review or another, and magazines that are not capable of doing justice to the product (if it's a good one) or show it's real disadvantages when relevant....
Yair
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I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Yair. The reviews I've seen don't do justice to the work which goes into perfecting the high end products.
But I do disagree with the "handful of reviewers" in Yair's statement. There are few competent reviewers, but they are available on tap - almost every publication has a staff geek or a top-notch consultant hidden away to be trotted out when necessary. I should know, when younger I've acted as this trophy-geek often enough for the french computer press.
I see two main reasons why magazines prefer not to activate their trophy-geeks.
Firstly, geeks are really expensive. My last publication moaned all the time about my rates, while agreeing they were justified by the quality of the writing and the readership accrued.
And then, geeks are opinionated, unpredictable and uncontrollable - they care about tech, and will as likely as not point out the product's critical failings - this is what happened to Aperture at launch, some photo geeks hated the image quality, and missed some essential features, and they were very vocal. But instead of listening, Apple shouted back. I should know, I was at the receiving end of some of the shouts
Now, no magazine will want to antagonize their advertisers on a regular basis - so they prefer to use the pattern of feature-list & product description and keep everybody happy. Easy to write, pleases everybody, no comebacks. And the geeks stay safely chained in the basement. Of course, a company that wants a careful review can always request one ...
For completeness' sake, I should say that some rare companies actively support geek-reviews and geek-articles. Adobe is such a geek-journalist lover : They will help you, make their personnel available, make sure you get all the support you need to learn complex procedures, and never complain about what you say. And, guess what ? They're successful and their products just keep getting better.
Now, I have a suggestion Yair, you can tell your favorite magazine that you would like your back to be reviewed by me, and then leave it in my hands for the 6 weeks to two months I would need to learn to use the software decently and exercise the hardware - irrealistic ? I guess so.
Frankly, I don't think that a solid opinion on the nuances one can hope to get out of this type of hardware can be formulated in less than a month, it took me much longer to learn to use my 35 mm digital systems, develop a look with them and start to stretch them - if you want a quick evaluation, then a testchart or standard target composition shoot will give you that, and leave you with next to no usable information.
Left in neutral gear, digital systems go nowhere, life starts to get much more interesting when you push them James here is a good example of somebody who knows how to stretch his Leaf back.
Edmund
