11-15-2016, 11:29 AM
You also need to know the personality, style and expectations of reviewer to make sense of any review.
For example, Ken Rockwell will almost always test the JPEG performance, which means auto-corrected CA, fringing etc. He will also dumb down most of the results and won't split hairs. If he says a lens is excellently sharp, it is almost always more than adequate. He puts much more emphasis on the ergonomics and will list a lot of features almost every other reviewer passes on.
I find his approach quite useful, to be honest. That way you can easily find out that a particular lens has a useless zoom ring (Wide end crummed together) or a rangefinder lens that has an odd filter size. He even lists the weight, filter size and a ballpark price in the first few lines, making him one of my top sources when I simply want to know the basic info about a lens.
On the other end of the scale, is Lensrentals. Roger Cicala can write the book about splitting hairs and he would do it in such a fashion that you'd want to read it just for the obscure references he'd put in between. He will tell you nobody else in the world can right now. If he says a zoom barrel wobbles and most other reviewers and users don't, that means the barrel will wobble if you mishandle the lens a lot.
Also, most reviewers have different standards. If you grew up using old manual focus Olympus lenses, new Zeiss ZF/ZE lenses won't appear smooth focusing at all. What some people call built-like-a-tank will be toy-like to a keen eyed person who notices that the mount is screwed into plastics, which is also what the inner barrel is made of. A good example is the Zony 55/1.8. Many people just notice the metal exterior and call it amazingly well built. It's not. Even Samyang 14/2.8 has been called solid a few times here and there. Well, they are. For 6 weeks tops.
For example, Ken Rockwell will almost always test the JPEG performance, which means auto-corrected CA, fringing etc. He will also dumb down most of the results and won't split hairs. If he says a lens is excellently sharp, it is almost always more than adequate. He puts much more emphasis on the ergonomics and will list a lot of features almost every other reviewer passes on.
I find his approach quite useful, to be honest. That way you can easily find out that a particular lens has a useless zoom ring (Wide end crummed together) or a rangefinder lens that has an odd filter size. He even lists the weight, filter size and a ballpark price in the first few lines, making him one of my top sources when I simply want to know the basic info about a lens.
On the other end of the scale, is Lensrentals. Roger Cicala can write the book about splitting hairs and he would do it in such a fashion that you'd want to read it just for the obscure references he'd put in between. He will tell you nobody else in the world can right now. If he says a zoom barrel wobbles and most other reviewers and users don't, that means the barrel will wobble if you mishandle the lens a lot.
Also, most reviewers have different standards. If you grew up using old manual focus Olympus lenses, new Zeiss ZF/ZE lenses won't appear smooth focusing at all. What some people call built-like-a-tank will be toy-like to a keen eyed person who notices that the mount is screwed into plastics, which is also what the inner barrel is made of. A good example is the Zony 55/1.8. Many people just notice the metal exterior and call it amazingly well built. It's not. Even Samyang 14/2.8 has been called solid a few times here and there. Well, they are. For 6 weeks tops.