Where we go from here

Thread title is “where do we go from here?”.. I suggest back to reading the first post in the thread...

We have been given the opportunity of participating in future plans for this site and, judging by the response to this thread and the poll, I am amazed how few members seem to care.

David

I certainly did. Maybe I didn't interpret it how you intended it to be interpreted.

Certainly, and your response is appreciated. I'm doing you the courtesy of discussing what you say fully and seriously. I could of course just say something bland like 'thanks for the great suggestions', then ignore it, but the way I think that would be a disrespect. Instead I assume that you'd like what you said discussed properly. Possibly I'm wrong.

I'm not sure I understand that - I read that as saying the biggest draw will be to offer something that DPReview has sewn up. I'm not sure that's what you intended to say.

I had a look at the thread you mentioned. I'm not sure of the point that you're trying to make. That interesting discussions are morel likely to happen on DPReview than here. Probably true, since most of the active forum membership has gone back there, as is to be expected.

You might have found it sniffy, but there is truth in it. The circles in which DPReview is considered to be authoritative tend to coincide with keen, brand-orientated amateurs. That's the group that it's always hung its hat on. And for that group it does a great job. It's also probably the dominant group in the market for cameras these days. The point I think that he's making, and so am I is since DPReview continues, and has that base so well covered, there's not much point competing with them for it.

You view hasn't been 'attacked'. Parts of it have been disagreed with. Other parts firmly agreed with. That's how discussion works, the way I see it. The things that you suggested were 'the image itself'. I responded 'completely agree'. I also offered some thoughts about what that might mean in practice. Then you suggested to be open to genres. I responded 'full agreement of that too', and talked about something that might facilitate that.
However, on the discussion of the point of filling some other gaps that DPReview leaves, the characterisation that the reasoning was 'because it wasn't for professionals' was somewhat wide of the mark. The point was that its technical coverage misses testing that would produce data which would be of use to some professionals (there are professionals doing many different jobs in photography, and they can have widely differing requirements) and other serious users. They probably wouldn't be very much use for the majority of the camera review market, because as I said, the readership can often be for reasons quite different from informing purchase and usage decisions.

Well I agreed strongly with two of the areas that you suggested.

Seriously. Why would you think that I wasn't being serious?

There's a lot to unpack there. First, I had no notions of anything 'elite'. That seems to be your attitude to it, not mine. Certainly, reviewing 'esoteric' items of equipment is an area that could be covered, and would obviously be of use to people that wanted to use that kind of equipment. But there are enormous gaps in the data available about everyday equipment. Let me give you an example. Suppose that you want to use a raw workflow and manage exposure to optimise for that. You see a lot of discussion on this kind of notion on forums, it goes under titles like 'expose to the right', 'ISO invariance' and 'raw headroom' and a few others. If you get interested in that you quite quickly find that there is no ready source of information that would support you working out the approach with your own camera, so you end up having to characterise it yourself. DPReview's data is more or less useless. You can cobble something together by combining data from Bill Claff and DxOMark, but they are both problematic in their own ways. Now add to that people who want good data on the colour response of cameras, and so on.

I have a very clear idea of what are the resources that will be needed to do the sort of testing that I would want, and I guess Iliah does too. What kind of resource do you think is required that would demand a large income to support?
I also would say that I'm 'dismissing' nothing. I've just pointed out that different use cases demand different kinds of data, and that there isn't much point covering again ones that are well covered elsewhere.

I'm not sure what the 'even' is in there for. Anyhow, that's more about Roger's objectives than resources. So far as I know, he's never tried to offer a comprehensive reviewing service. I'm not sure that we would either.

This is another area where 'experience' doesn't trump reality, I'm afraid.

From what I've seen he does.

I think that's possibly a bit unfair on members. We start threads like this because it's what we committed to do, but the truth is that clear directions forward don't emerge very often from this kind of discussion. You can look at most of the mega companies that have merged over the last twenty years or so, and the truth is in the early days their direction wasn't that clear, and if their users had had a discussion like this, it wouldn't have been very fruitful.
'Our way forward is making a phone that doesn't have any buttons and allows you to browse the web'.
'People need buttons. No-one's made a phone without buttons work'.
'Isn't that a PDA. You already did one of that and it crashed and burned'.
'Everyone's using the Blackberry - that has more buttons that nay other phone. Clearly lots of buttons is the thing to do'.
'You're a computer company, what makes you think you can make a phone better than Nokia?'
'It needs to run Windows'.
etc, etc.