Recently, I participated in a discussion about the "Best Super Tele Zoom." This got me thinking about selecting among alternatives. While there are millions of ways to analyze these decisions, in the image below is a notional analysis.
The first thing one must do is narrow the universe of all options to those that would be acceptable. That is, the alternative MUST meet certain requirements. Alternatives that fail this are then excluded from additional analysis.
Then one lists all their WANTS. That is what features, specifications, or fucntionality would you like to have but are not requirements. For each of these you rank them with a weighting factor to say how much more you favor one over another. Then you simply score each alternative to the criteria and multiply the score by the weighting factor. Finally you just total up the score and highest score wins. Be careful how you score as to not overweight one criteria.
As I said, the image shows just a notional analysis, but it does show how much I favor size and weight over some other factors and how that impacts the scoring.
BTW, unless everyone ends up with the same exact MUSTS and WANTS and ranks their WANTS identically, there can be no BEST! To say lens X is the best is to assume a set of criteria upon which that statement is based.
