DPReview Going Downhill Fast

I still have my Versalog and the HP. There’s another rotary slide rule, and a Bowditch in my sextant case, just in case (the electronics fail.) To the best of my knowledge, that was the last slide rule sold at MIT. I got it from the museum store. The remaining stock had been transferred from the bookstore.

For everyday use, all have been replaced by the iPhone, P Calc, and Soulver.

If that's the kind of attitude you adopt then I'm afraid that you're going to end up bitter and disappointed. All this improved technology has expanded your potential too, why not direct your energies toward taking advantage of it and enjoying all the possibilities?

It's the same world out there for all of us. The choice to resent it or be grateful is ours. I for one don't want to spend my precious time dwelling on the negative.

I still have my HP41 that I bought in the late 80's(?). I also have an HP48G.
Both still work perfectly.

I don't use them much as I have a calculator app on my phone that is RPN...

Sorry for the thread-drift...

I suppose you have a point, I should "keep on keeping on" posting shots taken with my Nikon Z50 or Sony RX100 III and make a point to remind people that they were NOT smartphones used and that any Photoshop or Lightroom was only very minor "retouches," that is, don't let the pollution of the junk (as I see it) dissuade me from doing it the better way.

There are some posts here to the effect that a problem with phone cameras is they don't have good telephoto lenses. There are many fixed lens larger sensor cameras - are those not "real" cameras? For example, photofocus.com/photography/these-fixed-lens-cameras-are-perfect-for-candid-street-portraits-and-more/

There are also many cameras with 24-70 FF equivalent lenses with full controls. Are they not "real"?

Exactly. The fact that IKEA uses mass manufacturing technology to churn out cheap furniture for the hoi polloi doesn't stop hobbyists from learning, using and enjoying their woodworking skills and taking pride in what they're able to produce the "old fashioned way".

I don't really think the onus is on me to prove your claim.

When I was studying automotive technology 40 years ago, we were forced to rebuild just about every component of a car. Not because that was what we would be doing in the trade, but to get us to understand how every component actually worked. It has served me well over the years.

Now I wonder if you have a photo of it in flight 🤣

I’m afraid these days are long gone. It’s layer over layer over layer these days, and state machines are ubiquitous. Hardware is fast enough to make lives easier. The times to deal with the mundane are over, and that’s a good thing, because it makes more time & room to deal with the more advanced topics and progress as a society.

Why I am not surprised... a thread about the fall of DPR ended up discussing computer programming.

I just got rid of the Versalog, but hung onto the HP. And I've forgotten how to do square roots with a pencil and paper. Siri does square roots, though.

These newfangled computers and libraries of support software are a slap in the face to those of us who learned the arcane art of cramming programs into 8K of memory using assembler language... 🙄

I don't know if I learned it from using a slide rule, but I used to be able to guesstimate things pretty well. A few approximations I sometimes employed.

pi is 3
45000 square feet is an acre.
100000 seconds in a day
10 bits in a byte
2^20 is a million
30 ml in an ounce
60 pounds of water in a cubic foot
7.5 gallons of water in a cubic foot
a pint's a pound
root two is 1.4
a nanosecond is a light foot
2.5 cms to the inch
40 inches is a meter
2.2 pounds is a kilogram
1.1 yards is a meter
the speed of sound is a 1000 feet a second
750 watts is a horsepower

The trick is knowing when you need accuracy and when you don't.

That's been a favorite of mine for a very long time.

Yup. If you enjoy the doing, then do it! It’s the reason I’ve gradually drifted into using mostly adapted film lenses over the last few years; I found out I enjoy manual focus and aperture control when I’m not shooting action. The feel of a well-damped and precise focusing helicoid, like a Pentax-M or an OM Zuiko prime. There’s a satisfaction in pinning down the precise point of focus, instead of letting the camera do it for you. At least if you’re not trying to capture a split-second moment. ^^;;

And the above is why I push so hard for backing up opinions.

If I step in and say “I think this is wrong because x, y and z,” you can reply “You might have a point with x, y doesn’t matter to me, but z is wrong and here’s why.” And we can keep going back and forth until we settle on some kind of answer. Like apertures on smartphone cameras. sheepish look (I could have sworn I heard that higher-end camera modules had them, but I was wrong.) It furthers the search for truth, to honor the phrase someone else here came up with.

But if I say “This is bad because it’s stupid.”… well, where does the discussion go from there? I haven’t given you anything specific to respond to. That’s why I say statements like that shut down discussion; there isn’t any response you can make - short of trying to think up reasons I might feel that way, and putting them forward until you get a reply.

That's true enough, but there are still unavoidable issues, no matter how positive you are. For example, I put together the monthly magazine for the local church, only around 2000 copies go out, but the elderly especially enjoy it. People have always sent photos in, and we publish a dozen or so, with the most impressive on the front cover. The best have invariably come from amateur enthusiasts, but lately we're getting more "impressive" ones taken on phones, with absolutely stunning sunsets and other sky shots especially, which I suspect are largely just a relatively quick skyward snap followed by a press of the "make awesome colours" button. To the (often elderly) types who contributed that little magazine was a chance to get a little acknowledgement for their efforts and hard-earned skills, no matter how minor, but now they're being matched or bettered by algorithms.

It's the contrast that makes it rather sad for me, will for will often be passionate about their photos and fully understand how they made them, while the latter will, in many cases, have been created in seconds as a throwaway moment by somebody which little understanding or interest in either the photographic process or the electronics and software involved.

There are a lot of really well made modern manual lenses, too - such as the very fast Voightlanders. And even here we benefit from the latest camera technology - it's so much easier to nail even manual focus when you have focus peaking (which I don't fully trust) or the ability to magnify the viewfinder 10X. So much nicer that trying to deal with a split-image focusing prism on a long, dim telephoto lens...

I'm sorry, but I just don't see why the one should take away from the other. In my world view, the craftsman takes his satisfaction from the work, while the duffer doesn't get that satisfaction. As I see it, why should the craftsman be jealous of the duffer?

I’ve used some of those old tele lenses back in the late 70s and early 80s…painful. The Voigtlanders are lovely lenses. The 35 f/1.7 Ultron is long one of my faves.

Apparently the DPReview site isn’t going down(hill) as fast as initially planned, but the errors keep increasing as the archival progresses. Censorship on the forums seems to be higher as usual in the past, too.

I'd agree for a real personal attack, but some mods at DPReview have some very loose definitions of a "personal attack". Two people were going back and forth over whether Canon's "Digital Teleconverter" feature used some special intelligence in upsampling the sensor crop to full sensor pixel count, and when I replied to one person, I mentioned that I thought that the other one had "not thought it through" regarding how much computation that would take and how slow bursts would be, and the mod deleted that post and another, and wrote me a PM saying my posts were deleted for a "personal attack". Saying that a person is incapable of thinking anything through is a personal attack, but saying that someone did not think a certain topic through is not, IMO, because it is something that we all do at one time or another.