On the state of tech "journalism"

Engadget-vs-reality
Originally uploaded by Dopeyrizer.

As marketing has gone to Internet and people's purchase decisions are more and more shaped by influencers and bloggers, the temptation must be great to start leaning towards a particular brand in order to enjoy preferential treatment and perhaps some funding as well. Case of Eldar Murtazin and Samsung is a prime example. I should think every consumer brand now has their list of friendly sites and this is I think quite okay. The fiercest battle has for a couple of years been in the smartphone space - there is no bigger prize today in any business than selling the leading smartphone.

For me the boundary of brand-friendliness is crossed when one starts to tamper with the evidence to get a desired result. Engadget published a comparison between Nokia N8 and iPhone 4 cameras and to the surprise of many the results seem to favor the iPhone.

That's an interesting result, as the N8 should from hardware point of view have a camera that's miles better. The N8 has a 12MP sensor while iPhone sports a 5MP one so it should be able to capture a lot more detail in each shot, unless constrained by the optics. N8 The Carl Zeiss optics are claimed to have a great resolution too, so what gives? For reasons only known to Engadget, the comparison shots have been resized to 800 by 450, so almost all the additional details in the N8 original shots are obviously lost. It's like comparing the topspeed of a Lada to a Lamboghini and running the latter only in reverse gear. So obviously the comparison is rigged heavily towards iPhone from the start, but still I couldn't get over how bad the N8 pictures looked.

For some reason Engadget also included the N8 (but not the iPhone) originals in the article. I took one of them and resized it to the resolution used for the comparison shots with Photoshop. If you click on the pic and view it in the original resolution can clearly see that the comparison shot published by Engadget for N8 has been heavily softened compared to the original. Just look at the flags and flagpoles in the building in the background, the water of the fountain or the pigeon behind it. Or the leaves in the trees, which in the Engadget comparison shot are just a dark green mush. The added details were not invented by Photoshop, they were there in the original but got somehow misplaced by the person who made the comparison.

The Engadget article states, that "Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking)". Haha. I don't know if this true for the iPhone shots as they neglected to post the originals, but for N8 I call that statement BUSTED...