Sad Threads of The Week, The Disgruntled Olympus Owners

The loser threads of the week are here. In these two threads, Phil Askey responds to a dPreview necomer and detractor who is perturbed about Askey's review of the Olympus E330 d-slr. Here, the newcomer, with a posting history consisting of two whole weeks on dPreview, attempts to cast doubt on Phil Askey's reputation and integrity through insinuation.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1022&message=17663958&changemode=1

As Ben Hermann suggests, the Olympus forum is now in a very,very,very sad and pathetic state.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1022&message=17676931&changemode=1

What's funny is that the poster calling himself Horatio seems to me to be quite possibly "Jillon Dames", reincarnated, with a new nickname. Here's the thread Horatio started, where he calls me a loser.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1020&message=17655572

Again, I suspect that Horatio is actually the (in)famous "Jillon Dames", who was banned from FujiFilm SLR Talk some months back. Perhaps he's not "Jillon Dames",and yet, he seems to write like "Jillon Dames" and to really like to heckle, like the aforementioned person. Kinda' makes me wonder who Horatio is,really, and why he's so concerned with Phil Askey's review of a camera. I'm not quite sure why people are expecting miraculous,low-noise performance from the tiny-chipped 4/3 format E-series bodies from Olympus....they use small sensors....small sensors with tiny pixels have excessive noise..simple physics. The E330 looks pretty noisy to me at elevated ISO's, from the review samples on dPreview, yet still I have not seen ANY prints made from the E330 files, but prints are a better test than noise crops seen on-monitor at 1 inch by 1 inch. Yet still, in comparison with larger-sensored d-slr's from Canon, the Oly E330's ISO 1600 performance looks absolutely noisy and smeared.

In this thread, entitled, "Oh,horatio",the thread's original poster calls for banning Horatio for clogging the board.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/readflat.asp?forum=1022&message=17675982&changemode=1

In the thread, Phil Askey HIMSELF takes valuable time to address Horatio's behavior, and to make an important statement; here is what Phil Askey had to say:

Begin Phil Askey quote: "If I cared what a few fanboys with an axe to grind had to say about what I know to be an unbias, neutral piece of work then I'd have been in the mad house a long time ago. I sleep at night because I know that I approach each review in the same way, treating each camera as a new model (even if it's a re-hash), going out regularly with the camera to shoot and get to know it, running it through our standard tests (each camera treated exactly the same way). The funny thing for me is that each review takes several hundred hours of work and yet just a few minutes to be shot down without a proper read by people who should know better.

The irony for the fanboys is that I seriously WANT someone like Olympus, Pentax, Sony etc. to beat Canon and Nikon, we need some new active competition pushing them forward, it saddens me when I get to the conclusion and I can't say enough good things about the camera.. And yes, in every single review there's a good percentage that's aimed right at the corporate R&D departments.

--
Phil Askey
Editor / Owner, dpreview.com " end quoted passage

See, this is the thing that the Fanboi's JUST DO NOT GET----my blog is not about me being "angry at Nikon" (you gave me a good laugh on that one Mark!) but that I want to see some real discusssion about the current state of digital photography, and I want to see REAL improvements in the products on the market. All the feel-good talk, the back-slapping, and the fanatically devoted distortions about the image quality of the various current products coming from the Fanboi's does no good whatsoever. People who say, "Be happy with the High-ISO performance of the D2x!" are really funny. The High-ISO performance of the D2x is poor and the D2x's Hi-1 or ISO 1600 equivalent in low, indoor light yields images which look like crap. Canon does better, with FOUR different bodies. And yet, the Nikonophiles want everybody to bow down and kiss Nikon's feet. In the Olympus case mentioned above, we have a guy who's so brand-centric he apparently fails to realize that the 4/3 sensor has a tough,inherent disadvantage to overcome. We have a guy who's calling ME a loser, when all he does is sit there and make veiled accusations that Phil Askey is a dishonest reviewer,and that Askey makes money off of click-through buyers who come to dPreview. What???? Who cares! It's Askey's web site. And Horatio gets to read it for free. Horatio seems quite perturbed that Askey didn't give the E330 its due and that Askey failed to mention the neat qualities of the Olympus sensor dust-removal system,and that Askey does not talk about how ANOTHER WEBSITE mentions that, up to 8x10 inches, much noise is simply dithered out when images from a noisy sensor camera are inkjet printed. I think the owners of the Olympus E330 have a nice thing going with their camera's sensor cleaning system, and I do agree with Horatio that *maybe* Askey could have better explained the sensor cleaning system Olympus has engineered. As for the noise of the E330 being dithered away to nothing in prints up to 8x10 inches as Horatio writes about, if one were using the E330 at ISO 800, from what I have seen in Askey's review, the images would look at the very least "slightly noisy",compared with those from virtuallty ANY APS-C sized D-SLR of the current generation or of the last generation. I see a pretty HIGH level of ISO 800 noise from the Oly E330 samples Askey has posted,and bad performance at ISO 1600.
This E330 review situtation reminds me of those who complained about the poor reviews the FujiFilm FinePix S3 Pro received from both Phil Askey and Thom Hogan, both of whom were villified in the dPreview forums for stating THEIR OPINIONS and THEIR TEST RESULTS. The various Olympus Fanboi's are currently having a similar really great time stirring things up.
Got news for you guys....if you want to write your own reviews, then DO IT. Start your own web sites or blogs,and exercise your right to free speech.