Pretend You're My Editor...

...What would you assign me to review?

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON

Featured Comment by Michael Seltzer: How about the Pentax Digital 645?

Oh, that's right...there is no Pentax 645D!

I'm thinking of starting a new magazine called The Vaporware Review. It would include product announcements, interviews with designers and manufacturers, and in-depth product reviews. I imagine this would well serve the photographic trade (maybe the entire technology industry).

As a first go, I'd like to see if I could get my hands on the obviously mal-formed under-glass model of the 645D. If I can’t, I can always build one. Doesn’t look like it would be too difficult. Maybe out of cardboard, or a lump of clay I pushed on here or there and painted black. Or better yet, Bakelite. Wonderful stuff, Bakelite, especially in that 1950’s yellow—a color not seen in nature and, like the secret pigments of some of the (long dead) great artists, one no one has been able to correctly reproduce since. Anyway, once I get a mock-up, I’d take it out for a field test, see what it can do. I’d try to cram a CF card into it, press down on the fake shutter release until something goes click, then write up the results (“On the plus side, this baby’s practically noise-free, unless you drop it. Trip the shutter and there’s no mirror noise, no vibration, no mirror slap at all, because there’s no mirror, no shutter to trip, and even if there were, there’s no way to trip it! And you can set this beauty up on a tripod, press as hard as you want on the shutter release and leave it for hours, and there will be no luminance or chroma noise—absolutely none! On the other hand, the resolution’s not so good”).

I mean, why wait for product to do a review? Why wait for data? In a world with such announcements, where people become celebrities not because of anything they’ve said or can do, but simply because…well, God knows; where even the government doesn’t allow pesky little things like data, information, or understanding, and certainly not the cries of the well-informed, to stop them from doing what they “know” to be right, why wait at all? Let’s go marching boldly forward, advancing the tide of ignorance (and trying to make a buck in the process). Hey, that could be the magazine’s tag line. What do you think?

Uhh—that you're having a bad day at the office? —MJ