Read the reviews.
Read the reviews.
Reviews help a bit, sometimes. There's however massive bias in self-reporting (reviews) and virtually none of the reviews cover long-term performance of items.
Provided they're available for the exact product you're looking at, which is often not the case when buying commodities like LED lights.
Yes I agree. You have to be very selective and read between the lines. At least you have a place to start with the web unlike years ago when you'd ask your brother-in-law.The issue with reviews currently is too many people write reviews without even using the thing.
Product makers have ways to skew reviews. Even Consumer Reports is often 90% BS. Anything Ikea or GE - laughable. Anytime a GE exec became head of another mgf co, I immediatley looked for another source, because it was almost a law of physics that the company would be trashified and out of business within six months, while the hot shot new CEO abandoned ship and ran off with his gigantic golden parachute money bag. Those guys were proverbial. And Ikea? Termites build more solid furniture than they do. But's it is amazing how many things they can make in high volume almost completely automated, with a minimum of employees. Whoever built their production machinery sure knew what they were doing.
A long time ago I did equipment reviews for Fine Homebuilding, and they paid me at least double of anyone else because I not only tested everything in real world applications, but actually dissected tools to check the internal quality. Most so-called reviewers never cut or drilled anything other than air for a few seconds. Some probably don't even know how. I was once curious what a professionally dressed man was going to do with a tube of roof asphalt and a tube of underlayment cement. He said he was on contract with Consumer Reports to write a report on Bath Caulks. Didn't even know what that meant, and he wasn't even remotely the worst example of that kind of incompetence. The fact that so many reviews are bogus is obvious because they'll assign completely different ratings to identical products, but just differently brand-labeled, whether it be a gallon of paint or a power drill. I remember an article where a Leica was called the worst 35mm camera because it cost too much didn't even come with a free case; some Sigma product got the best rating.
What a lot of today's U Tube reviews are really good at is helping people self-amputate a hand or put out an eye doing things stupidly. I gave Bosch hell for hiring a photographer for a staged ad showing incorrect and potentially lethal use of a new table saw design (nothing was actually running in the photo studio itself). Their legal dept got the point and retracted the ad. The model wasn't even using safety glasses either. They once briefly had an ex-GE type in charge of US marketing, and that kind of thing occurred. He lasted about six months, and then went to another major company which he outright bankrupted, and they brought back German mgt. I sold a helluva lot of Bosch contractor items, so they listened to me. But we love our Bosch convection oven too. Serious Bosch appliances are US made, as are many of their higher end power tools.
But here I go off on another tangent. Nobody follow me. But just as a matter of habit I seriously test things, and was frequently even paid to do so. And as a professional buyer for 40 years, I don't operate on ancedotal evidence. When I imply certain types of people are the black plague to manufacturing quality, it's because I've known a lot of them in person. Same with light bulbs. I never believed a thing the GE consumer division lighting guys ever said. You need to know who to ask, not just what to ask about.
Reviews simply aren't trustworthy, haven't been for years. Price rarely reflects quality these days, as everyone is racing for more sales, competing in the same price bracket.
You cannot even trust brands these days as it's just a logo stamped on a product made in WhoKnowsInWhatChineseCorner by modern slaves.
I feel that only experiment remains and opinion presented in forums by real users. And this too - for a limited time, because soon the spec will change, and so will the product in the race to streamline production...
we recommend lenses, cameras, film, scanners, scanning methods, or other equipment we own over other brands and methods, mostly brands and methods we never tried.
Reviews simply aren't trustworthy, haven't been for years. Price rarely reflects quality these days, as everyone is racing for more sales, competing in the same price bracket.
You cannot even trust brands these days as it's just a logo stamped on a product made in WhoKnowsInWhatChineseCorner by modern slaves.
I feel that only experiment remains and opinion presented in forums by real users. And this too - for a limited time, because soon the spec will change, and so will the product in the race to streamline production...
I'm afraid I have to agree, Ivo.
Social media has an almost worthless data base at times, Alan, or less than worthless. For example, let's say you want to buy a jigsaw, and might find some Amazon feedback or a few UTube flicks. First of all, they're all pretty much going to be on the toyish side of things; and in a single year a contractor distributor like my role was, with a big accompanying repair dept, would have a far more realistic data base thousands times larger, and based on real world conditions, long-term manufacturer quality-control interaction, routine access to their engineers etc. But call the local Appliance parts vendors in this town for a GE refrigerator part and they'll cut off your question and refer you to GE's own near-worthless website because they already know the hell involved. But when I was doing business with manufacturers whose CEO's whose careers began as skilled engineers rather than as partying fraternity presidents, and worked their way up, what a difference!
Frankly, I know very little about consumer quality cameras. I've never owned one. The same MF and LF gear I bought decades ago is still going great with a bit of periodic maintenance. My personal shop tools are lifetime, and perhaps even multi-generational. With a little TLC, same with my enlargers and most of my darkroom gear. It was commercial quality to begin with.
Sirius - reviewers for well-read publications - in my case tools and construction equip - today are mostly just lazy types who run to Home Cheapo and pick up several toyish cordless drills or whatever, which also all happen to come from the same massive factory in northern China, despite former US brand names on them. They fiddle around with them each for a few minutes or maybe even some minor test project, and write a article heavy in BS, and oriented to bottom feeders. Since many of those products do bear former US brand names, people just assume they're the same thing as before; but they're not. And often the "best buy" in a review is the worst buy, since it will probably perform poorly to begin with, and need to be replaced frequently.
But since I was a buyer who made it a point to routinely interact not only with our many contractor clients - serious, well educated kinds - as well as key people in manufacturing itself, and buying large quantities of equipment at a time from them, they routinely brought prototypes and even early production run samples to me to evaluate. One time a representative of the Swiss Embassy brought outright gave me a Swiss-made mining-grade rotary hammer, so I could do my review of that category of equipment top-down, not bottom up. I talked to engineers who had jumped from one company to another regarding patents and innovations along the way. I knew the maintenance history and reliability of items from our repair dept. Most of that kind of interaction was for sake of our own customer base, and their trust in my advice; any articles were merely a spinoff.
I lost the thread … it started as light sources and now it is about nail guns.
Reviews simply aren't trustworthy, haven't been for years. Price rarely reflects quality these days, as everyone is racing for more sales, competing in the same price bracket.
You cannot even trust brands these days as it's just a logo stamped on a product made in WhoKnowsInWhatChineseCorner by modern slaves.
I feel that only experiment remains and opinion presented in forums by real users. And this too - for a limited time, because soon the spec will change, and so will the product in the race to streamline production...
Benjamin FranklinThe bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.
Yup and in tandem with this:Decades later, almost all equipment 'reviews' in magazines were thinly disguised 'ads' and rarely ever said anything even was 'mediocre'.
Things never get criticized or they won't get free or loaner samples.
...Soooo - what bulbs to choose? : D
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