Ken Rockwell, You're a Fool

I don't do this often (ever?) because it's totally not an example of, "treating someone how you want to be treated," but I totally can't help myself here.

Ken Rockwell, you're a fool.

We'll leave off how you write of the excellent Nikon 17-55 2.8, "In some ways the cheaper 18-70 mm and 18-55 mm lenses do the same or more more and cost a lot less." Really Ken? They do a lot more? How? At 55mm the 18-55 has a maximum aperture of F/5.6. According to my math, that's four times less light than the 17-55 will let in at F/2.8 and 55mm. So...where's the more?

But we'll move on from there to today's update. Today, Ken wrote:

"D3 vs D300: In case you also are wondering, the D3 and D300 are 99% the same camera, as far as color and look are concerned. I'm seeing the same color and highlights from my D3 as D300, as Nikon promised, with the same color settings among cameras.

Also, as foretold by the users manuals and confirmed in person, the firmware is 99.5% the same. Everything works the same, with small exceptions of one or two features unique to each camera...

...Good news for D300 users is that the D3 isn't any sharper in JPG. Scuttlebutt is that people may need to shoot NEF to get optimum sharpness from the D3; too bad if true, because other cameras like the 5D give perfect sharpness direct in JPG."

So, what he's saying is, you're going to drop $5k on a camera (the D3) and shoot in 8-bit JPEG mode instead of 14-bit NEF (RAW) mode? By my math, that means Ken's advocating throwing away 43% of your image information by shooting JPEG instead of NEF. Now I'm not going to get into the whole RAW vs. JPEG debate, I'll leave that to those who know more, but this just makes zero sense to me. Also, consider this, from this excellent story on how to read histograms.

"8-bit device has 256 (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x2)[shades of gray/color than can exist]. A 12-bit device has 4,096 and a 14-bit device has 16,384 states it can be in." Ken, that's a stunning difference.