Camera testing bias

Ken Rockwell goes on a tear with his new camera, a medium format digital.

As his habit, Ken Rockwell exhibits a bad case of selection bias. For example, let’s take this quote from the first article:

All the 35mm rangefinders and DSLRs look pretty much the same, and the point-and-shoot is the worst.

I’ve also shown the fallacy of falling for claims of 12-bit, 16-bit or 24-bit image processing in-camera.

As those of us who have done this for a living since the 1980s know, the noise level of any of these sensors is much larger than even 12-bit processing. Throwing more real bits at the ADC only serves to quantize the noise more accurately; there isn’t any meaningful image data needing that precision.

Well anyone can see from his sample the 35mm cameras are not the same: the Nikon D3 exhibits tonality better than the Canon 5D Mk II and the Leica M9, as it should. And those aren’t even the right 35mm cameras to be testing against—I will bet you’ll get nearly the same result as the Mamiya DM33 in the Nikon D3X (with a Zeiss ZF optic on it). He does similar manipulations of outcome bias in order to get the result he is wants to get before hand in his high ISO test.

Continue reading about Ken Rockwell after the jump