Bobfisher,
I really can't understand your concerns here. Have you got some sort antagonism against graphs? Do you suffer from graphobia (or should that be graphphobia)?
In my view the incessant arguing and bickering over differences in the various aspects of a camera's comparative technical performance, as often seen at sites such as dpreview, is due to a lack of appreciation of the significance of the sorts of measurements conducted by DXO.
However, I do understand that for anyone who is not familiar with the units used in the graphs, such data may not be at all illuminating. There's a basic requirement, which is surely not unreasonable, for a person to familiarize himself with the significance of the units used, before they become meaningful. And DXOMark, in their various articles and descriptions of the performance aspects they have measured, do provide explanations of what the units mean and how significant the differences in values may be.
For example, DR is measured in Exposure Values, abbreviated as EV, and a difference in one EV is equivalent to a difference in one F stop of exposure, all else remaining the same. DXOMark also mention that a difference of 0.5EV (or 1/2 a stop) will probably be noticeable, implying that differences of less than 1/2 a stop may not be noticeable.
This is the sort of information which I find useful when making a decision whether or not to buy a new camera. Without such reliable measurements, I might be tempted to make a decision based upon hyperbole and misinformation which can abound in the absence of reliable measurements, each news source just repeating the misinformation or biased view already perpetrated.
For example, to extend Erik's analogy, we already have comments in this thread that cameras such as the Nikon D4 and Canon 1DX have better high-ISO performance than the D800. Do you really not want to know how much better and over what range of high ISOs the D4 is better? The DXOMark graphs will give you a reliable indication of what to expect.
Perhaps you rarely shoot above ISO 400 with your D800 (if you have one) because of noticeable image degradation, but you've heard that the D4 has amazing high-ISO performance, so you buy the camera hoping that at last you can get clean images at high ISO.
How are you going to feel if you later discover the truth, that the D4 only has better DR than the D800 above ISO 800, in other words, at ISOs which you never use because they are too noisy? A 1/2 stop improvement in DR at ISO 1600 is still worse than DR at ISO 800 using either camera, and significantly worse than DR at ISO 400 with the D800.
How are you going to feel when you discover that any improvement in high-ISO noise from the D4 is only apparent in the deep shadows by a barely noticeable degree, and that SNR over most of the tonal range at high ISOs is no better than that of the the D800, nor is Color Sensitivity any better?
