Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

One person writes and signs every page here. This one gives his name, sets out how a judgment is arrived at, and — just as usefully — says what he is not.

What set this off

It began with the most misread number anywhere on this shelf: an equivalent focal length printed as though it were a measurement. The millimeters engraved on a barrel describe the optic and never change; an equivalence applies a ratio to them for one sensor size, and it is arithmetic. Print the second without the first and a reader buys a framing they will not get. Once you notice it, the pattern is everywhere. A zoom quoted f/3.5-6.3 sold on the first of its two apertures, when the second is the one in use at the long end. A guide number quoted at a sensitivity and a coverage the listing never mentions. A stabilization figure in stops with no protocol beside it. A declared load offered as though it described a windy hillside. Nearly every page you find while looking for an answer has the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure you can check against a specification sheet.

There is a second problem, and it is worse because it is settled before the box is even opened. This equipment is bought on photographs and returned on compatibility. A filter whose thread is two millimeters away from the barrel it was bought for. An adapter between two mounts that cannot exist without glass in it, because the flange distance runs the wrong way. A cage cut for the previous generation of a body, so the battery door no longer opens. A plate that fits the clamp and rotates under a long lens because nothing stops it. A trigger whose radio system will never speak to the lights already owned. A teleconverter that fits, and takes the combination past the aperture the camera can still focus at. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing works at all.

So this is the page that was missing. This site reads what manufacturers publish, confirms every product reference market by market, writes down the line that decides — which mount a lens was cut for, which diameter is printed beside the ⌀ symbol, which of two apertures applies at the long end, which protocol a stabilization figure was measured under, which figure is a rating and which is a laboratory result — and says plainly when something is not published at all. That last part carries more weight than it sounds: most of the disappointment in this subject comes from a number nobody printed, or from one printed without the condition that makes it mean something.

Behind the site are notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which thread size a bag has standardized on without anyone deciding to, what a maker means by a shot count measured to a published standard, and the buying mistake each family invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a photographer by trade, a lens designer or a lighting technician, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its unit and its source, and tell you which figure the maker left out.

The full list of what has been covered

The list below comes straight out of the catalog, entry by entry, each one linking to the page that deals with it; add a family or retire a product and it shifts on its own, with nobody editing it. It records what is written about here — it is not a shelf of equipment that happens to be mine.

What I care about

Three things, and every page here carries all three. The number set in the largest type is rarely the one that decides anything — a body sold on its pixel count rather than on the kit zoom in front of it, a zoom sold on the wide end of an aperture range rather than on the long one, a flash sold on a guide number quoted at conditions the listing never gives, a tripod sold on a load figure rather than on the height it reaches with the center column down. What the thing costs to live with outweighs what it costs to buy — a mount outlives three bodies, a filter thread quietly decides every accessory bought afterwards, a battery range is discontinued while the camera is still working, and a bag whose dividers cannot be rearranged stops fitting the kit within a year. And the property that settles it is usually nowhere on the specification sheet: whether the thing is carried at all, because a tripod too heavy for the walk, a hood that will not reverse for storage, and a modifier that takes ten minutes to build all end up in a cupboard long before they wear out.

What I am not

I am not a photographer by trade, a lens designer, a lighting technician or a camera repairer. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its dimensions, its stated figures, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every focal length, sensor format, maximum aperture, filter diameter, mount, thread size, guide number, watt-second rating, stabilization figure, color temperature and rendering index, ingress rating, shot count, watt-hour capacity and declared load on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its unit written as published and its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a shot count or a stabilization figure measured to a named protocol, I report that the maker states it, with the condition it names beside it, and no product here is described as sharper, faster or steadier than another on the strength of a specification alone.

And this site is emphatically not an operating manual. For anything holding a lithium cell, for a flash head run from the mains, and for an unmanned aircraft of any weight, it points at the maker's instructions and at the rules of the country you are in — which decide where a drone may be flown and how a cell may be carried aboard an aircraft — rather than paraphrasing them. It repeats two statements rather than assuming them. A declared maximum load is a static figure and nothing more: it describes what a support holds without slipping on a level floor, it says nothing about wind or about the vibration of a shutter, and legs, head and plate each publish their own rating, the lowest of which governs. And a guide number and an energy in watt-seconds are two separate published quantities that cannot be compared: the first depends on a sensitivity and a coverage the maker chose, the second describes stored energy, and neither is the light reaching a subject. If a page here touches a rule, it describes it and points to the authority or the manual that publishes it, and goes no further.

Nothing here asks for trust because of the name at the top. Whatever a judgment rests on is written into the page that makes it, and the longer account of how a ranking here is put together occupies a page of its own.

How I work

No figure appears without where it came from: a datasheet, a manual, a published rating, a named standard, or the weight of what long-term owners keep saying.
No price, reference or specification is ever made up. Where a maker publishes nothing, the field is left empty and the page says the figure is unpublished.
Every reference is confirmed on Amazon store by store before the page goes out. Where a model has no offer in that store, the button opens a search on your own store rather than a product page that is not there.
Where the cheap answer is the right one, the page says so — and where the right answer is to move, re-fit or simply use what is already in the bag rather than buy anything, it says that instead.
No page here is written to sell a headline figure. Nothing is arranged around the biggest number printed on a box — the highest pixel count, the largest guide number — and where one generation barely differs from the last, the page says as much.

Why any of this was worth the trouble

Because this equipment is sold on photographs and on the wrong numbers, to people who will carry it for years and judge themselves by what comes back on the card. An equivalence is printed where an engraved focal length belongs. The wide end of an aperture range is printed where both ends belong. A laboratory stop count is printed where a protocol belongs. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the hood left in the box, the step ring that was never bought, the second plate every other camera in the bag will want, the trigger without which a studio head is a paperweight — are usually what decides whether the expensive thing is any use at all.

A fair part of this involves buying nothing at all. If one line here weighs more than the rest, it is that a figure a maker publishes describes a thing; it undertakes nothing. Reversing that sells more hardware and leaves a reader let down by a purchase that behaved exactly as its specification said it would. A good deal of what improves a photograph is free: fitting the hood that came in the box, moving a light closer to the subject rather than turning it up, taking the camera to the shaded side of a street instead of correcting for the sun afterwards, dropping the center column before extending the thinnest leg section, and putting a strap on a body before the first walk rather than after the first drop. Those things are free and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new hardware is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

Find something wrong on these pages and say so: it gets fixed, and the correction is dated on the page it belongs to. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · PhotoVerdict · Paris, France