Back on topic: Ken is willing to call the D800 a great camera if Nikon would just "fix" the flaw which bothers him: being able to quickly move from one set of saved settings to the other.

On June 29th he wrote:
"Now if we could get someone to improve the D800 code to make tapping the unused ( + ), ( - ) or ( OK ) buttons while in shooting mode able to recall previously saved complete camera states, we'd have a great camera."

Wulph said:
I even used the kit 18-55 that he thinks is the greatest thing since man invented sex. Thanks, Rocky.

Man invented sex? I thought it was a woman? You guys just don't read the little descriptors below the names, huh?

And, about Rock Kenwall, or whatever... he seems to have a way to really push people's buttons.... maybe we should just ignore him.

What killed me was when he suddenly had a change of heart with the 5d2 a few years ago. It's the camera I've been shooting with since '09. He bashed it senselessly until the obvious came forth: it was selling VERY well. So, Canon release a firmware update and now it's the best DSLR Canon had ever produced (at that time).

What kills me the most w/ this cheapskate is how he compulsively lies to readers & says he donates his gear to goodwill. He actually said the D800 he JUST BOUGHT was gone to donation, and he only shoots the D800e. The same guy who'll take a (free) 50 year-old Sears Roebuck lens given to him by fans, and reviews the pieces of crap. He only gives away the garbage, you know, like his 5d2, D800, 5d classic, etc...I can look past a cheapskate, but not a lying cheapskate. KR, get real. No one believes you. Cheapskate.

"On consumer electronics products like the D800, we now have 845 different options and menu items, which provide a total of over 5,439,486,960,532 different combinations of settings — of which only one is correct."

He appears not to have noticed that shooting in Raw lets one adjust almost all of the image-relevant settings after the fact, if one has the basic three settings correct, or else relate to things like autofocus and TTL flash, which enable getting shots users of manual cameras would simply miss.

I made a similar mistake for which I hold him responsible; when I first got into the hobby and had no idea of the extent to which he is full if it, I made a once in a lifetime trip to Hawaii and shot in JPG. I even used the kit 18-55 that he thinks is the greatest thing since man invented sex. Thanks, Rocky.

I photograph birds almost exclusively. I will never quite forgive Ken for his advice that I took as a beginner; always shoot JPEG. What a mistake.

Ken lists his reasons for his opinions. Just take him at his word and decide for yourself if what is important to him is important to you. There is a large amount of Nikon bias on this Nikon Rumors site. It is possible for Cannon to have a better product than Nikon in any given year. Surely the D800 has the best resolution. Canon had the best video for years. It is possible for the Mark III to be more user friendly than the D800 this year. No need for conspiracy theories.

:-)

I have a really hard time taking anyone who relies on affiliate sales seriously when they stop pushing cameras with supply problems and start pushing ones that don't. It's a little too obvious. Especially when he brags otherwise about the 'Rockwell effect' on product sales.

I give the guy credit for the work he does with products but he is running a business and no matter how often he claims suppliers 'don't pay him to do what he does' and how 'he buys his products with his own cash' (through his own affiliate links, no doubt), you don't make affiliate revenue on cancelled sales.

I'd be pushing the 5DIII too, if I were him.

I'd still shoot Nikon, though. ;)

KeriM said:
I'm new here and I have read some KR reviews in the past but never really found him to be all that bad so I just went to see some of his photos. What I noticed was the disturbing difference between his D800E shots of his kids and his MarkIII shots. The noise in the D800E shots is horrendous. I have looked at other sample shots with high ISO and haven't seen anything near that ugly! What is he doing to them to make them look so bad and why?

I find that sometimes he makes a shot that can make a piece of equipment look horrible. There is a picture with the 35 F1.8 and it looks horrendous...I have never been able to produce anything that terrible with my camera, but he makes a point to show it and point out as a downside to the lens. I was also looking at a comparison the other day and he shows the 70-300 is all blurry...obviously user error or something, but he still includes the pics in his comparison.

Not sure you can always trust his pictures/comparisons.

Eric said:
He recently posted some noise results from Pop photo, and his own opinion that seems contrary to what others are saying and contrary to his own review. I haven't seen the Pop Photo methodology, but I think that the results must be pixel noise as opposed to overall image noise. Has anyone seen the Pop Photo review?

http://www.popphoto.com/gear/2011/11/how-we-test

Key there is "with the manufacturer’s default noise-reduction settings" which Canon has always had a higher default NR. They also use dXo's software to evaluate the noise which only looks at the variation of color luminosity and does not score anything on the IQ or detail in the image.

This is why I wish they would shoot sets with NR 0ff, low, med, high and even use NR software (Nik, Noise Ninja, LightRoom) with the defaults and show the scores. That would be a truer "real" test that reflects a real-world user experience. For instance on the D800 files I have downloaded, I use Nik on them and the noise melts away to almost nothing. The detail is so high at 6400 it well exceeded what others 6400 files.

There is no way of accounting for Mr. Rockwell's actions, just as there is no way to know his current agenda. If, in fact, he has a current agenda. Sometimes I think his writing is just babble, fully consistent with the "about" page of his site. Pure fiction. His test shots may very well be works of fiction, too.

The kids sure are cute though, aren't they? Take after their mom.

Wulph

I'm new here and I have read some KR reviews in the past but never really found him to be all that bad so I just went to see some of his photos. What I noticed was the disturbing difference between his D800E shots of his kids and his MarkIII shots. The noise in the D800E shots is horrendous. I have looked at other sample shots with high ISO and haven't seen anything near that ugly! What is he doing to them to make them look so bad and why?

kenadams: yes! and see his review of a $3.50 camera, it even is praised for its features.

"Call me crazy, but this beater old point and shoot has its charms, like a far-faster wake-up time than a digital camera, and faster than other point-and-shoots since as soon as you slide open the barrier, it's ready to fire. Likewise, it has a perfect spring-loaded flash OFF - AUTO - FILL slide switch right by your thumb as you shoot.

Why can't good cameras be thought out as well as some crappy cameras? How come no other camera has as smart a sliding flash-mode switch as this $3.50 camera? This Chinon goes the instant you flip open the barrier; you never have to wait for a lens to motor out from its burrow, and it had 3 LEDs in the finder to let you know the autofocused distance."

funny!

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/chinon/auto2001.htm

Wulph: The reason for the various claims of living in international waters or New York City is a new California law that requires advertisers to collect and pay sales tax on any sales they make in California since advertising on a website based in California constitutes having a store in California. Ken lobbied and railed against this new law but it was passed as has been happening in other states. Advertisers simply drop advertising on a website rather than bother to collect tax for each sale to someone in California. Thom Hogan lost an advertiser over this issue also. I don't know what state Tom is located in but I believe he is on the east coast.

Ken provides a service offering both some information and some entertainment. I am anxious to see him (and DxoMark) test the new 24-85 FX lens and compare it to the 24-120 f4 Pro lens. Will it be as sharp for about half the cost and offer lower ISO (f3.5)half the time?

Rockwell Rocks!

Gentlemen, there is but one reason to visit Rockwell's site; a good laugh. Please see his section labeled “About” and pay particular attention to the Introduction portion, the second sentence in particular which reads in part “It (his website) is a work of fiction”. That says it all. Well, perhaps not. I honestly believe the poor fellow suffers from multiple types of personality disorder and/or mental illness. As an aside, I feel sorry for the guy. He has become so controversial that I fear he may be receiving threats. About a year ago he wrote that he had moved from La Jolla to a yacht way off the coast of California. More recently he wrote that he has moved is family to New York, yet the most recent photos he has posted appear to have been taken back in La Jolla. I'm not certain about any of this, but I truly hope no one has threatened him or his adorable kids. No one deserves that kind of despicable behavior no matter how much his writings defy the good common sense of perhaps an eight-year-old.

A few years ago Ken says the best camera is the 5dmk2 because it has the most pixels... FF to today and the 5dmk3 is because it is "more practical"...

Oh, my, I have to drop in on the idea of "the real camera". I think it is called "M" on the D800. Set everything at "M" and you are ready to go with a "real" D800. One must focus, set aperture and set shutter speed. Now on the Nikon, which has a light meter (guess those real cameras like Leica and Canon don't) one must set the ISO...but make certain "auto ISO' is set to "off" so as to maintain the "real camera " status. Then go to it.

It appears, when one fails to read the instruction manual, one overlooks the fact that all the NIKON professional cameras can be utilized as "real" cameras. This from a lady who was shooting "real" cameras before Ren Crockwell, Ron Bockwell, Ben Dockwell, whatever his name, was born. And my "real" camera was called a NIKON F.

@donaldejose - Of course we can set up our digital cameras so that we only have to adjust 3 things as well, but we have the <i>option</i> of adjusting more if we so choose. I figured out Ken's recent statements about noise. He is looking at jpegs with in-camera noise reduction. Canon chooses lower noise with a loss of detail, Nikon maintains more detail at the expense of noise. IMHO I think its easier to remove noise than to add in lost detail, so I prefer Nikon's approach... But Mr. R's blanket statement implies across-the-board noise results. I guess that is because he doesn't think any of us should shoot RAW.

@kenadams - Mr. R's definition, that is only one setting, so better still!

He should buy a disposable camera. A disposable camera is the world's greatest camera for everything, including shooting his kids, and even the high-end models don't have stupid-high ISOs, shoot the real raw (film), have fantastic ergonomics and only come with two different settings: flash or no flash. That should really give him time to think about his picture, long and hard.

Ken's point of view today on an issue discussed in this thread:

"on a real camera like a LEICA or Canon AE-1 Program, there are only three controls at most: shutter, aperture, and focus. On a real camera, we set no more than these three, and we're free to spend the rest of our time seeing the photo.

On consumer electronics products like the D800, we now have 845 different options and menu items, which provide a total of over 5,439,486,960,532 different combinations of settings — of which only one is correct.

It takes a lot longer to set-up a D800 for each new shot, and all that time is spent worrying about our camera, staring at its menu LCD, instead of thinking about our picture. On my Nikon F3, I can set everything with my eye on my subject. In fact, I can set shutter, aperture and even focus by feel on my F3 with my eyes closed! (experience shows us that each position of the manual focus ring corresponds to the same distance, so it becomes easy to predict and preset focus even before a subject gets there. DSLRs can't do that; only people can.)

With a real camera, it takes much less time to set it, and those three settings are all at least somewhat related to the final image.

Setting just three manual settings (shutter, aperture and focus) are good, compared to the easy stupor into which we can fall with a totally automatic camera like the Nikon F6.

It's horrible when marketing departments have loaded appliances that parade as "cameras" with so many junk features that few of us can master them well enough to take a picture."

There is some truth here although, of course, Ken over-exaggerates it as is his penchant. I love digital and especially how easily I can manipulate the image in post production and how easily I can obtain a print. But, we have so many features in our menus that we can focus too much on changing those settings that our attention is drawn away from actual photography. Also, digital advancements change so rapidly that we are likely to be lusting after a new body before we have even master the old body (unless we shoot everyday).

I think the answer lies in seeing all the options as preferences and switching preferences only when really needed. I used to shoot manual with slide film and thought about f-stop, shutter speed, what the center-weighted light meter was reading, whether I wanted that particular area medium gray or dark or light and adjusted my f-stop plus or minus accordingly or I moved the camera so as to get a light meter reading on the area I wanted medium gray and then recomposed and shot. I thought more about each photo back then. Now I just shoot on Matrix metering and P, A or S depending upon which factor I want to use as my base factor (or M when using monolights). It should be faster to shoot in matrix metering and P mode with the camera doing the focusing. Modern digital cameras should give us quicker shots with less thought to the mechanics and more thought to the subject. Once we "tune" the camera to our preferences it should be the opposite of what Ken says. I do check my LCD throughout a shoot to see that I am getting good exposure but I find it hard to really tell in broad daylight, easier to see indoors.

A little late in on this one. I usually only visit his site if I am curious about the make of a lens or really just lens info. I don't read his opinion, but I usually like how I can find information for the lenses and sometimes information on the line of which lens came when and was produced when.

He recently posted some noise results from Pop photo, and his own opinion that seems contrary to what others are saying and contrary to his own review. I haven't seen the Pop Photo methodology, but I think that the results must be pixel noise as opposed to overall image noise. Has anyone seen the Pop Photo review?

I can handle his begging. Everybody's gotta eat.
I can handle his photographic style. Everybody's gotta have his own style.
I can handle the pictures of his spawn. Everyone thinks his own child is wonderful.
What I'm having a hard time dealing with is his incessant self contradiction and boundless amounts of incorrect information. People new to the hobby will eventually figure out they were misled, and throw the baby out with Crockwell's yellow bathwater. If I were a product manufacturer and this guy gave my gear a negative to middling review without even using it properly, I'd go insane.

There are an awful lot of "I"s in those statements. I get that. Maybe it all says far more about me than it does about him. But msmoto asks why we must knock him. I can only speak for myself, but that's why I get the urge.

sevencrossing said:
Because we are jealous of the the toys she has in his cupboard
D4 , D800E, 5D Mark III, XPro 1 the M9 and all the the glass to go with them

At the end of the day. He who has the most toys wins

I just came from a racing venue where some of the "boys" had toys which were very expensive, and the use of the toys cost them about $30,000 for the weekend, providing they did not wreck them. But, a lot of them do not know how to use their toys well. Not jealous of this at all.

But, I would like a D800 and an 800E, and a Hassleblad, Leica, more lights, a few grips to carry the stuff, a driver for my bus.... hey I guess you are right....I really don't like Ken Rockwell and I do not even know him, ha, ha, ha:).

To me his text regarding the 5DM3 reads too much like paid advertisement. Years ago pharmaceutical manufacturers would shower physicians and pharmacies with lots of freebies, lunches, dinners, even paid-for vacations with the goal of increasing their product sales. Nowadays, regulations have drastically decreased that kind of activity. It's probably anything goes in the photography industry. I'm a non-pro who generally reads KR's stuff just to get his opinion so I can definately see how this could hurt Nikon's sales.