Sorry,
I'm more preoccupied finding out what is feasible and what is not.
It's a bid odd. DxO makes some real research and it's called DxO plague. Regarding the issue on PhDs I would just say that without the engineering stuff we would have a nice cosy echo-logical world with horses and no cars, electric light, cameras, TV and so on. Living without DxO plague, but having the real plague, wouldn't that be nice?!
It is certainly true, world can be without science, understanding, physics and math. But, science, understanding, physics and math are the factors that makes six or seven billion people survive on this planet.
Now, science is not absolute truth, we all now that. Once we thought that earth was flat, that was good science in that time. When we got telescopes we could see that the flat earth model couldn't explain some issues and started to realize that earth was round. Our understanding of the world around us changes, tomorrow's theories will expand those theories we have today. But, without theories and understanding we would be like blind men in a dark cave!
My view is that we need to understand how our tools work. That understanding can help us to make the best investment in technology. Let's take one of those car analogies: we all know that Ferrari (or was it Roll's Roice?) that makes the best cars. But if you are in real hurry it's hard to beat a Learjet. A Bugatti Veiron may be even faster. On the other hand, if you travel with cameras, tripods, flashes and a couple models a Toyota may get you from point A to point B in the most efficient way.
In my view everyone is entitled to having his or her idea, but that's absolutely no good reason to show disrespect to work that others do. DxO presents their measurements to the community, no one else does that! Im my view DxO does deserve some credit for doing that. DxO also makes a raw converter, possibly not the greatest one, I don't know, but they certainly do know about raw conversion.
Michael Reichmann says that it is his finding that his experience is not conformant with DxO test. That's fine, I have acceptance for that. But calling serious work "plague" just because you don't agree, isn't that going a bit far?!
I really have an issue with this, some folks do some serious testing. Their results are not what readers expect, so they get all the blame. DxO came up with a figure of merit called the DxO-mark. I find it a bit stupid, because tools are used different ways. Talking for myself, I'm seldom using high ISO. High ISO is certainly a merit but not a very important one for me. But, if you study the DxO results with some care you are going to see they are relevant. Unfortunately it is very hard to correlate the DxO measurements to other data, simply because there are no other data available, but that is hardly DxO-s fault, is it.
Our friend "bcooter" on this forums explains this very well. Customers doesn't care about equipment, the results count and the Canon DSLRs he uses fill the bill, most of the time. He shoots Leica M9 for leisure and loves his Contax with MFDB. I also got the impression that he would not invest in a P65 until he is able to calculate a reasonable return on investment. Mr Reichmann is in a different seat, he wants optimum quality and went from P45 to P65.
An observation. According to DxO-mark the P65+ is considerably better than the Nikon D3X, even ignoring the resolution advantage. Also the Nikon D3x is significantly better than the Sony Alpha 900 and the Canon 5DII. At least in these cases the DxO figures seem to make sense.
An interesting observation that Erwin Puts seems to make is that the Leica S2 has a better image quality than the Nikon D3X which in turn is better than the Hasselblad H39. I guess that the interpretation of image quality is always a bit a question of viewing point and I don't always really understand how to interpret Mr. Puts's tests, but I still find his conclusion interesting.
Best regards
Erik
As always Erik, as always...
Still remember the famous thread about the DR Heresy...
Are you preocupated by DR ? Fine.
I'm preocupated by the viewfinder and if the controls are well implemented.
The only think that are missing so far to complete this thread "as it should be" are the DxO plague and the PHD astro physics and quantic mechanics apply to photography.
IMHO.