Hacker News Reader

Comment by LeonidasXIV | Hacker News Reader

The point is that he just tells you everything is amazing and to please buy it from Amazon so he can support his ever growing family.

And sometimes his advice is good, sometimes it isn't but as a newbie you don't know which part you can trust and which one is one of his peculiarities. Therefore I would avoid following his opinions. His list of camera/lens specs is admittedly pretty good.

And the other issue is that his photos are so comically bad that I kinda have problems taking whatever he says seriously.

View on HN

He doesn't tell you everything is amazing. He usually seems skeptical, IMO, which is what one would expect from an old-timer in any profession (wish there was a little more of it in tech). Tells you that L lenses are nice, but he buys and uses non-L because it works equally fine for him (and yes, I know he primarily appears to use Nikon anyway :P). Says this about most expensive things.

I've personally noticed a large difference in the mechanical performance (not necessarily the image performance) of my L v. non-L lenses and thus prefer Ls. I have non-Ls but they get used a lot less because they're heavier, louder, and much slower to focus. This doesn't seem to bother Rockwell which is more than fine; he's probably a) much less spoiled than me and b) working in different environments where these issues are less serious.

Newbies never know who or what to trust. That's part of what makes you a newbie. You just have to come in and start trying things out and figuring out what does or doesn't work in your particular use case, and not stick religiously to random guy's blog if you find those techniques are not working for you.

> he just tells you everything is amazing

You can't even pretend that's true. Pretty much every new Nikon camera body review he puts out is a long list of 'this is exactly the same', interspersed with 'these useless numbers are bigger'.

The only recommendations I think he's given in the past 5 or so years is the D600, D7X00 for crop, and the D750 when that came out. Hell, in the reviews for later versions of a camera, he usually recommends to get an older model used. And for newbies, it's always the base model.

His monetization strategy is straightforward and transparent.

FWIW, I agree it's not a great place to point newbies, but the cynical/shill angle is too far.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com