Slashdot Mirror
Are Review Units Better Than Store Versions?
Anonymous Howard writes "Every now and then you hear about hardware manufacturers optimizing their hardware for certain tests or games to make their hardware look superior. I was surprised to hear of a new controversy brewing over reviewer units sent to hardware reviewers. This article claims that Samsung is sending LCD monitors with a contrast ratio of 700:1 when the consumer version of the same monitor has a contrast ratio of 450:1. Various sites list different specs for the same model, so it's somewhat confusing to know for sure which is correct. I don't doubt this happens, but I'm surprised that it would be this blatant. Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?"
Review units are free and Store units are...well...not free. That would sway my opinion.
no with a but
short answer: yes with a however
Well, you know how some radeon graphics cards can be 'unlocked' and some can't? I'll give you one guess at which I bet radeon sent to all the reviewers.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
I mean, I'm all for getting some free software and hardware for my PC.
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
Han shoots first. I think it's different in the retail version.
I heard Mandrake only sent copies of 9.2 to reviewers who didn't have LG CDROMS.
What ever happened to the ancient art of bribing the reviewer?
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Alright, I understand that this is false advertising, because the reviewed product is different from the actual product, but don't both products accurately describe the contrast? Like...the reviewed products are 700 to 1, and the consumer ones are 450 to 1...but aren't they both labelled as that? I think this would fall into one of those "check before you buy" categories...one of those common sense things maybe. As long as both products clearly indicate what their specs are, there is deception, but no actual lies.
The anti-salmon
"fraud with intent to deceive" comes to mind
Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?
Yes. Thank you for asking.
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
buy their stuff off the shelf to use in reviews. Otherwise companies will send the cherries to reviewers.
I worked for a couple of electronic manufacturers that had a standard operating policy to do this very thing.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Magazines get their test cars and motorcycles right off the assembly line, but you can bet the manufacturers send them those one the better end of the tolerances.
Also they save these for their race teams, if the rules dictate the vehicle must be stock or nearly so.
Microsoft, obviously
Yup, my review copy Playstation 2 is way better than the release version. Instead of PS2 in blue on the lid, it has DEV.
Ok, minor cosmetic thing, but very cool IMHO.
But only by the fact that Samsung have never sent me any such thing.
Dammit, I got into this business for the corruption. But do I get over-spec high-dollar hardware, automobiles or prostitutes? No, I do not. It's a bloody swindle, I tell you.
Look, Samsung. 20 inch diagonal, 1600 by 1200, 700:1 contrast ratio, 16ms response time. Is that too much to ask?
Delivery address provided on application. Favourable review guaranteed.
The answer is no.
That was an easy one.
Samsung Syncmaster 955df is crap, but the reviewers saw a really good monitor... coincidence?
As a former Maximum PC reader, I've been thinking that it would be rather easy for some manufacturers to send souped up review units out, to get good reviews of their product, when the actual retail product is inferior quality. Similar to how Road & Track will test cars with specific packages, which unless you are somewhat detailed oriented when buying a car, you probably would not get the same package.
I just believe that it's rather possible, but I am not aware of any companies that do this practice. Just stating my own $.02
blah
Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?
Quack II, anyone?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
Remember this?
This is a crummy thing for the companies to do but it also makes you wonder about the reliability of reviewing companies. Like how he stated that designtechnica prided itself on reviewing retail products, but then never explained why they were using a review unit, and after noticing the discrepency did a lot of talking but still did not bother to pick up a shelf unit and test it, to see if it was true. Most of the hardware reviewers seem really flakey to me, more fan boys than reliable testing labs.
Unfair tweeking is part of the reason why Consumer Reports never accepts review units from companies, but rather buys them from retail stores, just like anyone else would. The other reason is that receiving free stuff creates a potential conflict of interest which is why they also do not have any advertizing in their magazine or their website. This means that you won't have reviews out before products are released, and operating this way is more expensive, relying on subscribers to run, but it is worth it. I don't always agree with CR's subjective descriptions of products (cars especially), but the hard numbers they provide are the most usefull I have found, and have saved me plenty of money.
I really wish that there was some site equally trustworthy in the computing world. For providing informative analysies there are usefull sites (I have always been impressed with anandtech). But for reviewing components, I have yet to find one I trust.
Wouldn't that be why some manufacturers send certain "test" samples directly to reviewers? The "test" units might have been factory optimized or best performance, whereas standard store shelf parts are factory defaults. Of course manufacturers will want everything optimized for testing purposes, especially if it's a product that hasn't been introduced to the public market yet. Isn't it sort of like how certain CPUs (engineering samples) are shipped to reviewers "factory unlocked" (e.g. P4), while the retail version is locked.
has the same model number as other retailers, but a lower price. If you look at the Bestbuy HW vs the other retailers, the best Buy HW actually is missing some 'components/functionality'.
Take a look real hard at that stereo reciever before you buy it....
a lot of these units are sent to reviews before you can even buy the product in the store. with no actual consumer version to compare it against, everyone just pretty much accepts the results as long as they are within reason. by the time people are actually buying the products, reviewers have moved on to newer products.
car companies used to do this all the time. they would send a 'ringer' to the review magazines. you would then get your car, put it on a dyno or take to a track and not be able to match the numbers.
just one of those buyer beware things.
I always figured they would give a superior product, but I always figured they just made sure the product was more reliable, polished-off, more stable, etc. But I always thought they'd more-or-less send the same product, just with better manufacturing so they don't get egg on their faces.
However, essentially giving the reviewer a differenct monitor is horrendous. I personally think Contrast ratio is important, as do most reviewers. Not only that, but something like can changes the picture quality IMMENSLY. And in monitors, there's little else to review except picture quality (and features like contrast-ratio and DVI support).
Reviewers should buy products from stores and return them for a restocking fee (write the cost off as a work-expense). However, I guess sites/people the PREview products have little-other choice.
-Shadow
A while back, in the days of the first accelerated video cards, I do recall a manufacturer having specific code in the accelerator to outperform the competition in very precise tests (i.e. blit a precice character string on the screen) whereas you printed another string, results were different, much slower. The card was designed specifically to achieve very high performances (for the time) when running a specific benchmark.
Now, I don't remember the manufacturer nor the model, nor the benchmark.
I'm pretty sure review units are tested more thouroughly than regular off the shelf units. I'd be surprised if the defect % would be the same...
--- Worst tagline ever.
Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?
Is that anything like having your employees send out fake grass-roots letters, pose as random users on message boards, or secretly fund an "independent" study?
I used to work for a company that produced benchmarks. We often found the reviewer machines had little extras (like more memory), more cache on the harddisk, or evil hacks (like the no-error-correction jumper) on harddisks. Sometimes they would even go as far as putting in a different processor and hope it was overlooked.
More often than not you could catch this stuff and even the playing field when reviewing hardware.
The video card hardware vendors were even more creative.
A while back, I bought a 17" samsung monitor which had 102kHz vertical refresh listed in the online "review" of the reseller, but upon closer examination, I discovered that it was, in fact, only 96kHz, so I informed them of this.
What they told me was quite strange at the time, they said their review unit had a different refresh rate and that they checked with Samsung, but that there was no definite answer as to how this could have happened. All in all, they gave me a 19" for free for the trouble (which they apparently had no part of.)
This happened in Toronto, Canada in 1998.
It is good to know SlashDot picks up on such small things.
It certainly wouldn't be surprising if this were happening, although the Samsung case is certainly one of the biggest I've ever seen. This has been rumored to have been happening in the general hardware communities for years, with CPUs, memory, and video cards that are the cream of the crop, capible of overclocking far higher than normal chips. Unfortunately, it's rather hard to avoid, since even the obvious solution, buying products off the shelf, can resultin a product that could be better or worse than normal.
The best thing a consumer can do is to hang around the hardware communities, and see what people are actually getting quality-wise at the store, taking the average from there; reviews will never be 100% trustworthy, most of the time due to conditions out of the reviewer's control.
...car manufacturers have been doing this with reviewers for decades. Is it really so surprising that the computer industry is catching on?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
AFAIK, Consumer Reports does not take ANY units from manufacturers because there's always the chance they'll be sent a "ringer" unit that is better than the store bought models. It would seem that this is very much case in point.
Review sites that take donated hardware and advertizing from those same hardware vendors should always be held somewhat suspect until you verify the quality through another source. Few sites are willing to give a bad item "both barrels" because they would be essentially slashing their own throat/revenue stream.
In this positive review of the 191T, they state that the contrast ratio is 500:1. The Samsung site lists that unit with a 700:1 contrast ratio.
Does this balance everything out?
I'm guessing that if DEV ps2 units are designed for use by DEVelopers, then the DEV ps2 units have some sort of modchip in them. Have you tried playing any foreign or homebrew discs on them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Like in "here's a free expensive item for review that you get to keep. We'll be watching the review to see if you get anything else to review? Oh, it's still happening, but sending the reviewer a item that isn't the same as the crap they intend to sell you and me is just a little added insurance.
You can pretty much see this in a lot of reviews that are written too. The only reviews that merit much trust are the independent ones where the reviewer actually went out and got an off-the-shelf item to review; but this is an almost dead pratice. No only does the reviewer not get neat fre stuff then, but his review may be months after the reviews by the company shills come out, and he ends up with the same crap you and I get rather than the free good working versions.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Reviews can make or break a company. Just look at the high-end graphics card market: their main customer base are the gamers who live and die by benchmark numbers.
Hell, I work with commercial billing systems, and I can tell you nightmare stories of benchmarks being run on "special" data.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
That's the reason I can't trust a majority of the review sites out there - just to many "what if's" (Not to mention the worthless benchmarks.... A FPS Game demo on a toughbook? What?)
In a perfect world reviewers would be able to pay for the items they review without letting the manufacturer know. But unless your reviewing technology that's 5 years old the price is just to insane. Not to mention that most review sites online aren't anywhere near a real "money maker" and plaster ads everywhere trying to make a buck.
The first review site that does a "Car and Driver" type review is the one that I'll go to exclusively. Review the hardware now, a month from now, 6 months from now, and a year. Let us know that that dual amd board can handle being a DB server for a year straight, etc. Test the customer support, driver support, etc. I'd even pay for the extended tests.
I hate purchasing machines for work, be they DNS, PDC, SQL, etc, and having to stick with a big vendor because we know how they will work down the road. I'd much rather save some money and go with someone else, or even a homebuilt. There's just not enough support info or testing on others to be found to warrant it. It's a shame too.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Yes, companies will send their best stuff to reviewers, but there is a push from the opposite direction: they want reviewers to get their stuff early. In the computer world, this means that reviewers often get essentially prototypes. I've found that "first test" reviews of CPU's get processors that are worse than what the consumer will buy once production ramps up, because by then, many bugs get ironed out. AMD chips overclock much better later into the production process compared to the "for review only" samples. That's just one example.
The canonical slashdot response to such a query is properly phrased, in its entirity as:
"No."
Your inclusion of thirty seven extraneous characters, an 1850% overrun, has led the slashdot troll judging staff to come to tne unescapable conclusion that YOU FAIL IT!
Don't you remember the Win98 demo by Bill Gates, when it crashed? ;-) They didn't use any speciall things then! Oh.. sorry, they used their best OS at that time...
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
Why are the reviewers accepting "free" machines from the company? The right way to review is to buy the item off the shelf. If the companies want to give the reviews vouchers or checks that might be OK (I know some of you will cry foul on that too). In any case the reviewers should be using what general public will get instead of something that could easily be modified to give better results on the test.
I was reading a review of a Subrau WRX on caranddriver.com and it mentioned that their original review unit was able to post a 0-60 time of about 5.4 seconds. The requested another car from Subaru for a "long-term" test drive, which for them is about 60,000 miles over the span of about two years. This long-term car was equipped very similarly to the previous model, yet, it was never able do below a 5.9 0-60 time.
Now, ever car enthusiast knows that 0-60 times and such the like are subject to various conditions, but that's a pretty large inequity in the difference between the two cars. They said they must have just gotten a lucky hot car, but I believe that perhaps they got a cherry that didn't have to last as long as the car on the long-term test. If they were only going to have the car for a few weeks, then it didn't matter if it was as reliable as a longterm car, so they upped a few things and gave it to them for review. Same thing with the monitors, I guess. Since its just for the flat panel review, they might as well spice it up. These companies base a ton of business on "independent" reviews, so I suppose its worth it to fix the results.
And there's even an advertisment campaign for Gainward's line of graphics cards that specifically pokes at this concept, and doing so for quite some time ... here's just an example, and a Google search turns up many more results of this advertising campaign and the resulting products from it ...
...
Perhaps I'm just overly cynical, but I tend to trust reviews where the reviewer went out and purchased an off-the-shelf retail copy of X rather than those where the company sent something. Of course, this is hard to do in print publications, because of the time-lag that magazines run through (ie, two months after it's released on the shelves, they have a review of it), but I see no reason (aside from money, which is a big reason) that online reviewers can't do things such as this. I also tend to look towards user-reviews and give those a pretty good weigh-in when I'm making a purchase decision. This is the first instance that I can recall where products are blatently better when given to reviewers than those that are store-bought, but I get the feeling that it's been done in the past.
The above paragraph reflects what I do for my personal buying choices and should in no way construe that that's the optimal/correct/whatever way for large corporations/organizations/whatever to buy-in-bulk
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
With the new Sony LCD aspect ratio of 4:02, 6:9, 8:5 max??? How would this differ from the Quazi 4:0 and the 6:9 ratios? Guess what... it doesn't. Manufactures for years have done this. One word: Marketing. See, if you compare the Samsung model no. 320 equate with the JVC 530 you are still getting the exact same aspect range, just generated differently. I can tell you one thing, the software is selling itself. Hardware manufactures are getting scared and providing new tactics/tricks. You be the judge.
Has anyone heard of other stories of manufacturers being deceptive so that they could get better reviews?"
Well, how about this?
Search for the word 'Canada' to get to the falsification bit. Yes, this is a very old example, and no, it's not computer-related, but it still seems pretty relevant.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Have the companies send them a voucher or 'special id' that lets them get X product from any retail outlet. Then the hardware reviewers can pickup there stuff at Radio Shack, Future Shop, the local pc store or anywhere else.. and that way this negates any way of them 'upgrading' there products just for reviews.
No, this is
I've heard a lot lately about car manufacturers flat out lying about their horsepower ratings, and every electrical engeneer and audiophile I know swears that Watt ratings on speakers mean absolutely jack shit. So what else is new?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Every once in a while i read the Auto comparisons on Consumer Reports to get myself all worked up.
Consumer Reports will not accept donations of vehicles or products from manufacturers or vendors just for this reason. They will discreetly send someone out 'under cover' to go acquire the products in an "off the lot" or "off the shelf" state.
This is good, and commendable.
However, i see a lot of times they will end up mis-matching the cars and trucks they compare. Usually it is simply a matter of trim levels on similar classed models. This *will* have an impact on the final outcome. Obviously it's difficult to do things *exactly*.
Less often, but still wrongly, they will compare vehicles from incompatible classes- things like Buick Century vs. E-class Mercedes vs. Toyota Camry. Or the classic truck comparisons with the 3/4 ton, V8 powered Dodge and Chevy fullsize trucks, against a V6 F150, against V6 Toyota Tundra and Nissan.
Consumer Reports might do this to other product reviews too, but i only pay attention to their auto ads for `entertainment'.
I guess that no matter what, *any* test can be flawed.
do() || do_not();
Hardware manufactures have been doing this kind of thing for quite some time. They control who get's the hardware before a major release, and thus effectively control the reviews themselves. If your in the business long term, than you have to have the newest shiniest thing. Why do you think that the day a product is released that all of a sudden sites can have extensive reviews that took a week or more to do? They sign NDA's and on their release date they go public.
The problem with reviews with hardware is that first impressions count a lot more than they do than with things like cars. This is because the life cycle is so much shorter than for just about anything else. A car can be on the market generally at least 5 years before it would get a major changover, most hardware has a lifespan of 18-24 months.
A major advance in hardware will be scrutinized finally when it initially comes out, and all but ignored once it's been on the shelf for a couple of months. Let's face it, have you ever seen a piece of commodity hardware that was reviewed after it came out? You haven't and you wont, because by the time it has come out, it's too late for a review to be profitable. It's a long term problem, that needs a long term solution, any ideas?
You have to doubt a companies commitment to their paying customers when the review unit creates pants wetting excitement among magazines, but once you get it in your home you find it's all the same parts as in the review, but the performance is no where near the reviewer's benchmarks. You also have to wonder about a company who's support is mentioned in every review as being excellent, top rate when the review unit is having problems, but when an average joe tries to get support on a bad motherboard that's affecting gaming, you get advice such as "try unplugging your cable modem and plugging it back in to help with your gaming problems"
Not trying to troll against AW, (I can't help ranting about them when I get the chance, however) it's just that this type of behavior can be seen with any company that tries to hype a high end product and build a reputation among consumers.
I guess it all comes down to "Buyer Beware", but it would be nice to be able to trust reviews every once in a while
I review computer hardware/software for a daily newspaper, and I can tell you that, in many cases, the quality of the hardware I get is less than what you'd see on store shelves. This is because reviewers often get pre-production units, which are essentially lacking some of the bells/whistles and fit/finish of production-line products. Whenever possible, I try to insist on production models, but that's not always possible. It's even tougher for dead-tree magazines, which work on lead times of months, to get full production units.
That said, there's no way for reviewers to know with pre-production units whether they are getting what will eventually be on the shelf - and it may not be a case of the manufacturer trying to get away with something. A processor in a pre-production unit may be faster, or an LCD screen have a greater contrast ratio, than what ends up at retail, but the reason often is that design changes are made at the last minute related to cost or part availability. In fact, sometimes the product may be less powerful in pre-production than what is finally delivered to buyers. This was particularly true in the days of falling RAM prices - I'd get review PCs with 128 MB of RAM, and when they shipped they'd have 256 MB.
C'mon, baby, kiss The King.
A year ago we wereb looking for cheap 19" monitors. We came accross the Xiangcom 19A. We read in 3 magazines that the monitor can do up to 1920x1440 at 75hz. However when my company bought 5 of them they could only do 1024x768@50hz. After reading comp.hardware.monitors.xiangcom on usenet I found out that they made a limited sample of monitors with an extra pin in the VGA cable. This pin Duplexed the Veritcal and Horizontal sync values to increase the resolution. They did this so they could sell the 19B and 19C versions at a higher price (the only difference was the pins in the connector).
Nevertheless, by soldering a PIN into the VGA connectors of the monitor our company saved around $750 by not having to buy the expensive 19C monitor.
Caveat emptor also comes to mind.
The quality of a review certainly depends on the way it is done. If you are testing some new stuff, and call the manufacturer to send you a sample, they'll most definitely pick the best they could find.
If, on the other hand, the reviewer buys the stuff in a random store, it reflects the product quality in a much more precise way. Of course, even then there is a chance that the reviewer gets a test sample which outperforms samples of the same production, but there is an equal chance, that the test sample is worse than average. Good tests can ONLY be done by random sampling a large number of samples.
The early Samsung 955DF was a perfect 19" flat-black screen CRT with .20mm dotpitch. The control panel was a rectangle in the center that when pushed, slowly slid diagonally down to reveal the control buttons. Very slick.
Early Samsung 955DF
Now the "Samsung 955DF" has controls on the front, the screens are much more reflective and oily-looking, and black appears grey even when the brightness is all the way down. More recent Samsung 955DF
About a decade ago PC Magazine got their first review of a Pentium MMX CPU before it was officially released, because HP (I think it was HP...) sent them a review unit. Only HP didn't tell them it was an MMX CPU; they have hoped the reviewer will be impressed by the unit's great performance (due to increased on-chip cache) without noticing it's an unreleased CPU model.
On the other hand, I review books, and sometimes I get copies from publishers for reviewing. Sadly, however, the review copies I get are never better written, better edited, or have better plots than the copies you could buy in a bookstore.
- Tal Cohen
Since a few people have brought this up...
If you have a reviewer that actually takes the time to go through the whole program, the concept of: 'more features, faster, more relyable' doesn't seem to work. I mean, if it were truely the case, isn't there zero additional overhead for selling the newest version of that software? With hardware, you can sell a 'stripped down version' to avoid the manufacturing overhead, but with software...?
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
Two things I saw when I was writing product reviews. First, it was very common for the manufacturer to test the review unit before shipping it. It was uncommon to get hardware that hadn't been opened and resealed. Second, preproduction units often had different specs than the production models. Usually, known differences were noted, though.
A lot of the manufacturer reps and pr reps I worked with would hand-select or pre-screen review units, but I never ran into any where I thought I was being given something better than what would ship just to get a better review.
http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
It is standard practice for major tire manufacturers to submit "specials" for review by those consumer magazines which do not take the trouble to purchase off the shelf products for testing. I know this because I worked for one of the largest manufacturers for more than ten years. The game was, and I assume still is, to work up a special version in the R&D labs using a specially formulated tread compund which would give superb handling and wet traction at the expense of mileage- which the testers would never get around to checking. Worked a treat.
It's the same bunch of advertising firms that represent hardware manufactures as represent automotive manufactures. The idea is that if some guy named Ivan "Ironman" Stewart wins the Baja 1000 driving a Toyota that looks like a pickup truck, the consumer (even if they do realize that it really isn't a pickup an that little if any of the design and engineering are actually in the trucks on the dealer's lot) thinks that if the same guys that built that Baja winning vehicle are building the cool truck that can make them look like the "Ironman" or better yet make their buddy look like an idiot for buying a Ford so much the better. Same thing goes for computer hardware.
... would check the unit and note the contrast. At that point, s/he would contact the vendor and request the consumer version, or review the model, but noting that it's not the same versiont that sells for $xxx.yy at Foo Computer Store.
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
Well, in the monitor/tv dept, ive heard that pretty much EVERY company pays best buy, circuit city, compusa, etc etc to brighten the contrast and fine tune the picture on their models and even to worsen the quality on others, as well as sending them special models. unlike most people on slashdot i think...im not anti-microsoft, i havent really seen them do anything like this like someone had sad previously saying it was "obvious". but yea...gfx card manufacturers...as well as intel amd etc...all send these "unlocked" cards/chips...take a look at THG.
Needless to say, we've had NO trouble with any Seagate SATA drives since then (outside of the normal hard drive failure rate, and Seagate seems to be more reliable than most).
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
My friend's brother worked at Dell back before the tech bubble burst and his job for 5 years was to optimize units to the 9's before they went out for review... He spent weeks on a single machine to figure out how to tweak it to the max; How's that for random selection? -Jordan
That was them claiming it had more colors than it did, not that the reviewers got machines with better screens.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Ever look at packaged food? For example, recently a manufacturer introduced fudge brownie cupcakes. Over the last month, we've noticed that the size of the cupcakes is getting smaller (they now slide around in the clear plastic container; previously it was a tight fit).
I work with manufacturing/fabrication plants, so I get to see a wide variety of sophisticated electronic instrumentation and manufacturing equipment. Typically, a vendor will introduce a new tool as a demo. In all cases, the vendor will have chosen the best performing tool out of their available stock.
This is just common sense on the part of the product vendor. Who would provide their worst performing tool/product to a reviewer?
EULAs often make the problem very clear: many (not all) EULAs for software, and even some for hardware, make it a violation of the EULA to post benchmarks, reviews or to even use the product in benchmarks and/or reviews. This would mean, in a perfect world for manufacturers/ISVs/whatever, that you can only review selected products, and only in an environment set up by the creator of the product. In a way, reviews could be considered marketing, and the "consistent" and "coherent" image of the product is something that product creators will want desperately to control.
...
My problem is this. The EULA creates a set of conditions which is more restrictive than regular copyright law, but in order to argue that the EULA's provisions are contrary to case and codified copyright law, and therefore invalid, you open a very, very nasty case of worms which makes SCO's GPL complaints appear quite valid. It is clearly legal to review products, post satires, perform academic research and publish the results of that research, on items which are covered by Federal Copyright law*. It is wholly unclear if "click-wrap" and other "buy before you read" EULAs are valid on their face for the purposes of covered exemptions under copyright law, which would make (many, not all) instances of reviews of released products impossible, unless they were provided by the product creator.
I don't think we can have it both ways. If the GPL is valid on its face, and disagreeing with its terms means you cannot use GPLed software, then EULAs are valid on their face, and you cannot post reviews of a product which forbids such reviews in its EULA (if you want to continue using the product). I hope someone can post a convincing argument that we can have our GPL and eat the EULAs, too. I am sure there are some out there
*: Of course, the DMCA might have something to say about that
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
I was managing editor for an online magazine once (combatsim.com) and I found it hard to balance the free-gift syndrome most of the review staff had when getting products to review.
Prior, stuff I sent them was kept for them to use. We later developed a policy to ship everything back to keep unless it was inexpensive (such as software or small devices).
How corrupt are manufacturers and product retailers? Would they send an enhanced product to get a bias review and then manufacture a sub-standard product? You betcha!
To avoid this issue, we often went out AFTER a product was released and reviewed it on our own dime to remain objective. That way we experienced what the average joe would go through...manuals, product information, packaging, etc.
Most companies would just send us stuff without us asking and the result was that we often had to deal with products that were prototypes vs products that were finished.
The general rule is look who's doing the review. Tom's testing standard are pretty rigid and established. I'm hoping Tom's got common sense to purchase the real product than rely on possibly 'enhansed' demos.
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
I did some freelancing as a game reviewer for a few years and made some great money doing so. I also got a lot of free stuff. Even so, I reviewed every game I ever received honestly, and stand by every review I ever wrote.
However, my editor frequently upped my scores. A game that I would give a 4/10 would routinely get a 6/10 in the review, and paragraphs where I complained in detail about problems were mysteriously removed. I got paid the same amount, and it's the editor's right to do that to my work, but is it honest and unbiased? Hell no.
I once had a discussion with a bunch of game publication editors about review scores and they all adamantly claim that free products, previews, advertising, and even special events (like driving an F1 car, or flying an actual F16, or having a PR rep buy you some whores) would *never* interfere with a game's score. "Game publishers do not decide editorial content," was what one editor said. Of course, he was the same one who routinely made my scores more appropriate to various PR people.
As I said, though, I stand behind every review I ever wrote, just not every review I ever had published.
Ian Bell: "We pride ourselves on reviewing boxed retail products, the very same you would purchase in your local store."
That's obviously not true. If DesignTechnica has a monitor with a 700:1 contrast ratio, and the boxed retail product, the monitor you would purchase in your local store has a 450:1 contract ratio, then they are not reviewing boxed retail products.
If they don't go to a retail store and buy the product in its retail package, they are not reviewing boxed retail products.
We know these review sites are beholden to manufacturers. We know most such sites would close shop if they had to review (and pay for) the retail product. To pretend to be surprised when products sent out for review don't match products sent out for retail is disingenuous (at best).
When the owner notices a food critic in his restaurant, does he run back to the kitchen and shout 'everybody do everything exactly as you always do'? Or perhaps he suggests a little extra attention go into preparations for that particular meal.
Consumer Reports reviews boxed retail products. They have buyers around the country go to actual retails stores and buy products in actual retail boxes. Anything less is not a boxed retail product. Any reviewer who does less, yet claims to review boxed retail products is a liar.
They do something called "Blueprinting" They make sure every part is exactly factory specs. No play in clearances, valve sizes boring etc.
I used to do this with motorcycles and it usually took a week to bore everything out and match exact factory specs. The change between an out of the crate bike and a blueprinted bike was substantial. The exact same thing can be done with anything Cars, Hardware televisions etc.
An old sales trick with televisions is to adjust all the settings internally to make it have the best picture possible. Depending on what they got a commision on they would go to a better quality TV and adjust the contrast, brightness etc so that it would look like a lower quality than the one they got the most $$ from when viewed side by side.
Photons have mass!!?? I didn't even know they were Catholic...
When I was involved in the review of video games and related hardware the reviewables (especially software) were usually inferior to what was released. Sometimes we would even get hand built peripherals. The only cases where the hardware was superior was in the development consoles that were used for Beta testers. In many cases these had more physical RAM and such, and the games ran better than on the final hardware (smoother animation, etc...).
The common situation involved getting sent a final beta while the finished game was in pressing. You would get a note included that had a break down of all the bugs and problems with the beta you received... this also had a note to the effect that all of these things have been fixed, so just "imagine that the problem isn't there and don't let these issues effect your review."
For this very reason we instituted a "finished product only" review policy. Funny thing was, supposedly Next Generation magazine also had this policy but there were several reviews I called them out on where they had blatantly reviewed the beta version of the title (the original WipeOut for PlayStation is a perfect example that comes to mind).
As for doing reviews on developers hardware... well, of course this has the potential to make a poorly made game look and/or play better, and thus get a higher score... but then again a sizable chunk of advertising in a mag can also achieve that result.
...are its usage bias of the products they review -- they assume that every product they review is made to satisfy some everyman need, and products built for speciality audiences or specifically designed to do one thing REALLY well and 3 other things just OK get dinged badly in reviews, even though the one thing they do really well may make the difference (eg, 50" HDTV with shitty speakers but FANTASTIC PQ).
This would be easily mitigated if the product reviews were serious articles with a lot more commentary and fact included in them, rather than a half-dozen photos, 4 paragraphs and a ranking table. An entire issue of CR is about 40-50 pages, with photos and tables taking up half the space.
If they reviewed the same amount of stuff every month but the magazine was another 50-100 pages of actual written content discussing the products, the review process, etc, the apparent everyman bias wouldn't be as bothersome AND the magazine would last me longer than the taxi and takeoff of an airplane flight.
I don't trust a lot of web "reviewers" anyway.
I would rather go out and read reviews posted by people who actually spent the money to buy the product and peer review it. I think that if 800000 people told me it's not good, I can trust at least 1% of them.
I think even traditional magazines are biased, or am i just paranoid?
-joe
This reminds me of a certain *ahem* dispute between ATi and nVidia months ago..
Do you think if Intel sends toms hardware a new CPU to review, they don't test the hell out of it to make sure they send the best one possible - the one that can be overclocked the furthest?
Wouldn't you, if in Intels shoes?
I was burned by this when I bought the first run of the Asus P4S8X motherboard. Review sites like toms were talking about this board being the cats ass, stable as a rock.
However, the first runs of the retail version were garbage.
They had a different clock gen, a different stepping on the 648 northbridge chip, and were unstable at stock settings - myself and tons of folks were pissed. The released a bios update "fix" that underclocked the system, running DDR333 at 266 (though the bios said 333 benchmarks confirmed the real performance).
Anyways, the point is, the super mega ultra board that was reviewed was NOT what was shipped to customers. It was as simple as comparing photos in the reviews to the board to see that.
To me, the fault is the reviewers. They should go down to best buy and grab the same retail box I would.
To me, getting free booty to review == paid endorsement. I lend them as much credibility as I do John Stamos' on 1010-987.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Is the difference between an outright lie and a deception really that important here anyway?
Not here in the good 'ol USA. Cause everything we hear is true and we just lap it up. Here's a good example: things are going so poorly because we're doing such a good job. That's right. If you lost a loved one overseas or got your apartment downgraded to a cardboard box, that's the price of unbridled success. Thanks for playing!
700:1
Michael, shut up. Go jack off to some porn of Iraqi women.
The 1986 IROC-Z Camaro only came with a 305, but the reviewer units (50 in all) came with a 350. (My '86 had a 350 from an '87.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I ran across this http://www.legitreviews.com site recently and was quite impressed with their reviews and *scanned* invoices from vendors. http://www.legitreviews.com/Reviews/ddr500_1.shtml
I was not very suprised to find the newest issue of a major PC Mag does almost the same review with completely opposite results. We definately need more review sources we can trust.
>Then it really comes down to these asshats being nothing more then movie reviewers then doesn't it. And how often is a movie reviewer accurate in thier evaulations?
1) Movie reviewers don't see special versions that are different than what the rest of us see.
2) Movie reviews are subjective opinions. Hopefully, informed subjective opinions. Although product reviews generally include the reviewer's subjective opinion, there is usually a factual basis for that opinion. Consider these questions: "Did the product work as advertised?" vs. "Did Johnny Depp do a competent job of acting?"
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
When they first shipped one of their 8x CD Burners, it was a rebadged plextor. You could flash it with a slightly modified Plextor patch and basically turn it into a Plextor burner. This was the version of the drive that went out for reviews, and obviously it did well.
Shortly thereafter, they switched to a way cheaper rebadged Samsung (with less capabilities) and left the packaging the same. It was impossible to tell from the packaging which burner was in the box.
www.ping.be/satcp/writer04.htmI believe Sonnet often practices sending clocked down units to reviewers that also have better cooling and gold lead wires on the upgrade boards. The shipping units will often be "at clock cycle" Mhz rated with tin/silver leads and usually metal heatsinks.
OWC caught them doing this a year or so back - there, cache slot upgrades were 450Mhz Chips OVERCLOCKED to 500Mhz. The review units were noted on some messageboards as being 550Mhz rated chips clocked down to 500Mhz (indicated on the chip itself).
Powerlogix often ships special software to reviewers that enables better cache speed or that sometimes alters the Mac firmware that does not make it to consumers. Reviwewers are asked not to review the units without the custom software. This was indicated recently by their BlueChip upgrades for Pismo PowerBooks and their 900Mhz G3 Upgrades for Blue & White Macs. They sold these upgrades as 900Mhz, but the Apple System Profiler saw them as 550Mhz. Reviewers were sent a special firmaware utility to make the System Profiler read correctly. Consumers had to live with the 550Mhz and find out there upgrades were incompatible with niceties like Virtual PC 6 and iSight compatibility. The firmware is JUST now making Mac news (5 months after the release). Powerlogix hasn't officially posted to their site. All the reviewers would have caught this and noted it in their reviews.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I read this in Car and Driver:
in their first radar detector test, a new model, the Escort, vastly outperformed all the other detectors. Except one: a cheap detector called the fuzzbuster. In fact, the fuzzbuster and the escort got identical test results. The reviewer bought another fuzzbuster off the shelf and took both apart. The review model was actually an Escort's guts in a fuzzbuster box. The real fuzzbuster sucked on the tests.
So is thats how those low price gaurantee's work?
Quack, quack.
In the mid-1990's my company did quite a bit of high-profile graphics card benchmarking. Because we focused on testing chips just going into production we'd usually get alpha and beta revs of boards from the well-known board vendors at the time. It was routine for the boards that were sent for testing to have custom BIOS that set the clocks on the hardware well above specifications.
For vendors that did this chronically we switched to getting boards through other channels -- but we needed the hardware as soon as it was released, so we'd usually have pending orders with the retail arm of a board manufacturer. They got wise to this and started doing the same thing with retail boards being sent to us.
Then we switched to straw buyers. Since there were only a few preorders made in my state (AZ) they started doing it to all boards destined here, which was pretty entertaining. We'd wait a month and buy the board from a storefront and it'd be clocked 10-20% slower.
I won't even begin to go into what we saw happen with drivers...
The software industry is RIFE with such abuses.
In a previous job, my employer had a special team of people called "Product Managers" - but their job was to go visit magazine reviewers, ensure that they got top of the line grade A technical support during the review process, including onsite support, and coded patches directly from the developer's desktop to the reviewer's. Additionally, there was wining and dining, and talk of strippers and lapdances (though I never witnessed that). In that sense, what was reviewed in no way bore any resemblance to the shring-wrapped package some poor sucker paid $699 for.
I'm no longer working in that sector, but for my 10 years, the practice was commonplace. Which is why I never read reviews.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think another reason they may be doing this more is to stop bogus returns. What do I mean by that? Simple, buying on the internet, picking one up at BestBuy the same day, and returning the one you got via internet to Best Buy. I did that a few times with movies, but nowadays Best Buy is pretty competitive with online prices. That was probably even a worse problem with audio and video stuff. Heck, for video stuff I can't even find some of the same models between two different Best Buys!
An example of this is with movies and CD's now. Some of them (like Indiana Jones with the bonus DVD) have different UPC codes than the ones you get online.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've noticed on many occasions that a review of a product contains incorrect specs -- and they're always incorrect so that the product looks better than it is. An example might be a review stating an LCD monitor has a 400:1 contrast ratio, but it's actually 300:1. I'm guessing these types of "mistakes" usually aren't the reviewer's fault, but instead are "intentional typos" on the specs given to the reviewer.
Absurdity: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion. -- Ambrose Bierce
I could swear the reviewer and I were dealing with different product...
Perhaps man-math is involved. You know, where 7" = 1 foot.
where i work, a MAJOR, retail outlet. We simply take a unit off the floor at random, and display it. The manufactor has no choice except to maybe make ALL of the first batch of units we receive better or simply not lie to us. I know this article has to do with review units and not demos but just FYI.
>Has anyone heard of other stories of >manufacturers being deceptive so that they could >get better reviews?" No, Never... But now that you mention it, that Big Mac I had at lunch didn't look at all like the ones on the TV. You think they deliberatly used better ones for the commercials???
Guido the Bounty Hunter (in a strained raspy voice): Han, I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. If you don't hand over Jabba's money, my two cousins No-Neck Bossk and Boba the Chin will have to have a talk with you.
Han: Tell Jabba he can have his money after I finish the anti-pasto.
Satisfied? Duh. BTW Guido is a common Hispanic name. Since when did one have to be factually correct to be funny?
I recieved a review copy of XP, but when I opened the fedex package, there was an unopened Mac OS X box with a piece of masking tape next to the "X" with "P" written on it with black sharpie pen...
:)
Needless to say, I now love Windows
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
We know this goes on, it happens in every industry. Of course reviewers get pre-release models, tweaked games, extra features... that's why you never trust a review from a professional reviewer. Seriously, how many people read movie reviews before deciding to watch a movie or not? How many go, even if reviewers pan the movie, because their friends said it was ok? I can't be the only one who waits a few months before buying a new product, checking usenet to see what others say about it.
Really, buying something the day it comes out based on what you've read from reviewers is like... installing MS Service Packs the day they're released. Well, maybe not quite, since you can always bring the product back to the store and get a refund if you don't like it. Too bad you can't do that with service packs...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
...much tighter tolerances.
Tim
Jesus. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition? Still a masturbating peeping Tom, are you?
My Karma is bad. May I take you out for a drink? It's on me...
I review 3D graphics software and hardware for a number of publications and have been doing so for almost 10 years. First of all, the really expensive stuff, like hardware, you rarely get to keep. Software you can keep, but I'm in the position where most of the vendors send me software anyways, whether I review it or not. That's good, because it gives me a way to compare and contrast things and I don't give good reviews just to get the latest copy of a program.
Typically, if I like something and it's worth it, I give it a good review. If it's crap, I don't even want it on my system, so it's deleted and put back on the shelf or in the trash. Hardware like graphics cards are also treated the same, if they don't work well, why keep them?
As for off-the shelf items, usually by the time it gets on the shelf, the review has to be in print. I usually get machines/software that are the first ones off the line or in late beta. This puts me in the unfortunate position of having to trust the vendor that bugs will be fixed, etc... I try and wait until the actual release, but sometimes deadlines are deadlines.
Finally, I've never had a machine that has been rigged or altered for a review, but I'm sure some vendors do that sort of thing.
Everyone here is ranting on about "Yeah, I've seen it done before in cars, video cards, etc. Only one post brought up the point that it may be a simple mistake and a little more digging would have clarified the situation. Note this:
The contrast specs on the Samsung USA site show the following:
172T - 700:1
173T - 450:1
The specs on the Samsung Canada site say:
172T - 500:1
173T - 700:1
Perhaps he got a Canadian unit although I don't know why they would be any different.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Eventually it came out that the cars Lamborghini provided to the testers were about two hundred pounds lighter than the production cars, and developed something like 150 more horsepower than stock. Since then, car magazines have become much more circumspect about which cars they test.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Favourable review [dansdata.com] guaranteed.
:(
I fear from this that dan's data is now corrupted
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
Saving sig aborted.
Reason: Your subject looks too much like ascii art
The conspiracy theorists are at it again...
First of all, any reviewer worth their weight in salt doesn't get the hardware they're reviewing from the manufacturer. They walk into a retail outlet and buy it anonymously.
Never ever pay attention to "pre-release" reviews because they are almost always skewed, or based on hardware that will never see a store shelf.
This is all just common sense people... Hardly worthy of a slashdot story..
Apparently 2-3 dead pixels is perfectly allright. You can of course buy "insurance" against this but still I find something odd. How come none and I mean none of the showroom models have any death pixels? There is even a megastore that has two walls lined with lcd's. I carefully walked past them and no one death pixel on any of them. Odd. I guess all those people complaining about broken lcd's are just unlucky.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If they know that the product is going to be reviewed, they want their best specimen to be reveiewed. They'll make sure that there are no problems with that model because on the few rare occasions when something to be reviewed is DOA, and it's for a major publication, that can really hurt sales. You want the reviewer to have no problems. Now if one or two or several thousand actual customers have problems, who cares? As long as more schleps keep buying your product because the model the reviewer had rocked, all is well.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
I can recall this happening in the automotive industry as well. Olds let some trade rags review a late prototype of the turbo Toronado at one point. The boost was dialed up to around 12psi, and the reviewers had fun putting the car through its paces. Of course, when the production version arrived in showrooms, the boost was set to mild 5psi.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
The last company I worked for engineered a benchmark test before the company's new RAID SCSI host card was completed.
The card was benchmarked against a RAID Ultra SCSI LVD card from a German competitor named ICP Vortec. Even though the new card was in development, they expected it to beat the Vortec. It didn't...until they removed most of the Vortec's components and replaced them with parts from a much slower (and inexpensive) card that wasn't even considered a serious competitor. These benchmarks were used in advertisements, entire phrases stating the superiority of the product were co-opped from press releases by lazy magazine columnists (which is sadly common in most journalism nowadays), and sent to companies requesting further information. On a somewhat related note, a claim on the product sheets for the aforementioned product line that the product had been Windows certified ended up costing the company a $10K fine from MS and had to be destroyed.
I guess that ultimately it doesn't matter. The owner sold the company to the largest competitor.
Oh! ME TOO! ME TOO!
:)
... well... ok, we have blinkenlights. But that's NOT THE POINT.
No, not really. I'm not here for the scandals. I'm just in it for the free stuff, as are the rest of the miniscule NerdReviews.net crew.
Nobody ever said technology reviews were glamorous with bright lights and
Bleh..
I have not lost my mind... it's backed up on disk somewhere!
Just had to write a message to clear it up.
Don't you hate it when Slashdot gives dumbasses like myself mod points?
----
#SickNotWeak
People will not pass up a good oppurtunity to boycut a company, unless they are sure everyone else is too ... consumer protection is a job for the government.
A reviewer is pretty naive, or pretty greedy, not to imagine that the products manufacturers give him are not souped up in some fashion.
If the review doesn't say how the reviewer obtained the product, or if the review does say that the manufacturer provided the product, readers should just move on.
Bogus reviews are rampant in this industry. Anyone else remember the annual PC Magazine issue devoted to printers with reviews of a printer on the left-hand page and an ad from the manufacturer on the right-hand page?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I guess it just sucks a little more with larger purchases like hardware and cars rather than foods.
I dont thinks its that wrong it is in our nature to put forward our best when being tested, we all might work a little harder when we know the boss is watching (even if we're not a slacker), we just have to learn to judge things right.
I can't say that the LCD with 700:1 is just a coincidence, but CPU's for example have different steppings that experienced geeks can identify as able to oc much higher. The athlon 2500+ xp barton with a stepping of XEA, ZEA, or ZFA are known to be not only the latest steppings, but we know that these steppings mean that they could overclock from the original 1.8 GHz to 2.7 GHz easily.
I spoke with my sister who used to work for Asus and it was widely known among employees that certain batches of motherboards etc. were better though all products were checked to meet the minimum QA requirements. I'm sure most electronic manufacturers are able to identify the better section of their inventory.
Here in Germany Porsche has sent 911s to reviewers that ran 560 km/h instead of the normal 280 km/h...
Naah, just kiddin'..
CR's strength is in making sure the product does what it says on the box without catching fire.
And for 90% of the population that's all that matters. If someone is looking for a widget that does X, they'll be able to avoid the obvious lemons and get something that performs adequately relative to other products on the market. People read consumer reports because they don't want to waste money by buying products that fail. More people prefer predictability than not.
This is why vehicles like the Honda Civic and the Toyota Camry are the top-selling cars in America. They're generic. They are blandly consistent in their basic across the board "good enough" designs. They're purchased by librarians, teachers, your mom, sysadmins, kiddies and lots of people who need basic transportation. There's nothing exciting about them, there's nothing that they excel at.
If you're an enthusiast, and the performance is important to you, you're going to be reading the enthusiast magazines and web sites. You'll know the technical details about the products and you don't need Consumer Reports.
If you're going to complain, complain about standard review practice - across the board by every review source - is not necessarily to review the products that are actually on the shelf.
I've noticed that at Best Buy they seem to introduce "christmas lights" into the signal for the non HDTVs to make the difference for the HD ones that much more.
-no broken link
Apple is definitely not too cheap to spring for a $0.0025 LED, that's not the issue, and cutting corners isn't a goal. No Mac has a HDD activity light, just like no Mac has an L1/L2/L3/L4 activity light.
The hard drive is a slower backup to ram, which is itself a backup to L3, to L2, to L1. You don't measure activity to any of the other memory devices, so there's no *design* sense in measuring the activity of your hard drive.
There's an LED to measure it's state: On for on, pulsing for sleep, and off for off. Don't tell me the Mac is cutting corners because it's a design function, not a cutting corners function, just like a PC without a sleep-LED isn't cutting corners, it's just not designed into the system!
GPL Deconstructed
The first is that I'll bet they loose a small amount from teh credit card transaction that they cannot recover (perhaps this is not true).
The second sort of loss is really the sort of loss that only MBA's and accountants consider a loss. They see a sale, and rind that up - but wait, now the money is gone!! They are befuddled, it has thrown off all projections about sales. They may well have been seeing a trend with higher returns that was messing with a revenue forcast and are figuring out ways to halt the increase in return of unopened items. The sort of thing that keeps accountants up nights.
Since I considered Best Buy's loss very little, if any, and I buy plenty of other stuff from them anyway taht I know is overpriced I never minded doing this much. But I know it was messing with thier minds!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Fuzzbuster gets busted by Escort and Car And Driver Mag for stuffing Escort guts inside of the Fuzzbuster supplied for radar detector review (1979):
:)
http://www.valentine1.com/lab/MikesLabRpt5.asp
While you're there, please check out a Valentine One. Mike Valentine makes by far the best detector on the planet, and he's a heck of a nice guy!
--
Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works! - Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) "Spaceballs"
... if anything, I've been surprised by the amount of defective review hardware sent our way.
Three examples off the top of my head: An eMachines desktop's power supply went on the fritz within days; a Samsung smartphone entered a catatonic, buttons-flashing state after a couple of weeks; a Microtel PC sent by Lindows showed up with a detached heat sink.
My own theory is that deadline pressure cuts both ways--PR types want to get review hardware in reviewers' hands as quickly as possible, and sometimes that means grabbing whatever is available off the production line.
But, sure, a company with a little more time on its hands can still try to soup up review hardware. That's why it's also our job to keep up with what regular users are saying about all this stuff as we write each review.
There is natural variation in many manufactured items, even on assembly lines.
In the case of the LCDs, measure contrast in a few hundred, send the top few percent to the reviewers.
Cherries (as in cherry picking) is one thing, different parts is another.
This has been known for ages. THG usually points out that they got a piece of HW selected for them by the manufacturer and that it might not reflect its performance in the real world versions bought at stores.
Review samples, if they are pre-release prototypes, are always better than the finished products that you and I can buy in the store.
Time and time again I have seen erroneous reviews based on prototype samples, specifically: the Asus P4S8X review sampled buried the final retail editions in terms of performance and ATI video card compatibility. The Asus P4SDX had many more options in the review samples than the retail edition ended up with. The Intel E7205 chipset was also grossly overrated due to pre-release samples -- specifically the Gigabyte 8INXP, which got glowing reviews from Dufus Overclock on motherboards.org, and ended up having severe issues with ATI video cards (the 9700, specifically) among other performance and manufacturing problems that resulted in a poor-quality retail edition.
Video cards are notorious for having altered prototype samples and even altered prototype drivers.
-JemI trust the Consumer's Union because they go to a retailer, purchase an item off the shelf, then test it and report on it. They don't take "eval units," and they don't take advertising. When I needed to choose car seats and other items for a new baby, I signed up (pay) for Consumer Reports Online.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
This may not be in /. readers viewing area but. When I've gone searching to price-compare models of dishwashers, I have *never* found a match. Ever. It seems every major retailer (Sears/HomeDepot/Whatever) all have thier own 'set' of units from each producer.
Nevermind what Consumer Reports has listed for models... a true nightmare in patern matching.
Oh and every color is a different model too.
I've seen this once. I was looking at a new stereo once upon a time and CC and BB had identically looking units, but one was running a sale and had the price about $20 or $30 cheaper. When I took in the add, the numbers matched exactly, but one ended in T the other P, so they said "Sorry its not the same". It was a bunch of hogwash, so I went down the street and bought it at the cheaper store. Damn it, I was looking forward to that extra 10% (about $50 or so) off if they were the same.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
If you turn up the brightness of the back light then the full on brightness will be higher. The Lower value should be about the same since the lcd should block most of the back light. To get a brighter back light you increase the voltage across the meurcury vapor lamp.
I suspect thet the trade off is that the lamps life (time to half brightness is reduced).
So initialy greater contrast but shorter life of the display.
retail stores do not know how to set up monitors for display
I was helping a friend build a new computer. After reading the reviews and getting the internet prices, we stopped at CompUSA (about a block from my house) to look at some actual products. (Do not worry. We would never buy anything there.) All of their LCDs were showing the same 1024x768 picture that was mostly black with a dark graphic including a human face.
All 17" LCD monitors have the natural resolution of 1280x1024. All of the 17" and larger ones were blurry compared to the 15" ones (natural 1024x768) because the image was the wrong resolution and had to be dithered to fit the display's natural resolution.
Always judge monitors with the screen mostly white. Most computer use (email, word processing, programming) is black text on a white screen. And the lines across a Trinitron CRT and the dead pixels on an LCD are not visible when the screen is dark. Displaying a black image is about as good as displaying the monitor without power.
---
If you follow the links in the article, Samsung USA lists the correct specs of 450:1 and 1280x768. Samsung Canada lists 700:1, which might appear as if Canadians get a better model, except they list the natural resolution as 1024x768. Knowing this must be wrong (see above) means you cannot trust their other specs. Why aren't both sites pulling the specs from the same database? Have they heard of Web Services, or even data normalization?
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Judg3, welcome to your life as an exclusive reader of Geartest.com!
We do exactly what you have described above as a "Car and Driver" review which we try to summarize in our motto: Real Gear. Real World. Real Reviews. They are long-term reviews, in a real production environment, with retail versions of products (something we specify and insist upon since we do not review prototypes or pre-production models), all without any pandering.
This type of review and testing can be exceedingly difficult to do for a number of reasons:
If we see enough demand for the extended tests you describe we may implement them on a limited trial basis, but our pre-launch program showed that few were willing to pay for such a service.
The frustrations with the lack of high-quality reviews you describe is very much one of the reasons why we started Geartest.com. I don't like to spend my hard-earned money on a new piece of equipment only to find it falls far short of expectations and "reviews" by so-called "reviewers."
Many manufacturers were taken aback by our comparatively rigorous review policy and outright refused to participate. Others ignored us after learning of our review policy, even after initially agreeing to provide review units.
We must be doing something right because we have seen our traffic grow steadily with plenty of positive feedback from readership. Traffic has grown to the point where manufacturers have become much more responsive. They see the value proposition of having an unbiased, long-term review, even if they view it as a low-cost form of product research and testing for next-generation improvements. It seems some of those manufacturers who were initial doubters are starting to see things our way.
It's called a joke...you fricken ass...gimme a break...I am all for the PC/Mac battle and all, if that really gets you off, but really, lighten up, don't take everything so seriously...it doesn't have to devolve to "faggotty fanboy zealot" the minute someone makes a joke about Windows.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I thought I told you to stop jerking off on that damn computer and clean your grandfather up. He is covered in his own feces, and that is no way for a man of his age to be.
Don't make me come down there to the basement and unplug your cable modem. You should be out in the sunlight getting a job. It is downright embarassing to have a 35 year old man living with his mom who lives with her father, in Florida.
Mother Coward. Making the world a safer place for Mac Zealots since 2003...
Company delays paying up as long as it can to make interest, fails to pay up due to bad review, or item is given good review to make sure manufacturers pay up. Repeat till magazine goes bust.
It seems to me that a suitable punishment would for hardware review sites to refuse to review Samsung's next product (enough reputable hardware sites would have to agree to this), and instead include a blurb on what happened this time.
That should unfavorably impact sales, and teach Samsung to be honest with hardware reviewers.
May we never see th
I think overall, they do give good advice to the 50 percentile buyer. They're a good starting point, I think they do the fairest review of cars (and I am an auto enthusiast).
They don't suffer from gee-whiz-itis.
Their reliability records for cars is generally dead-on.
All that for $20 a year? C'mon. Its *bargain*.
"but they have some good qualities that most people don't dispute "
No, they don't. Saturns are mediocre cars with mediocre drivetrains. That's reflected in reviews at car magazines, and at consumer reports.
They're actually an expensive car because the price is the price.
Saturns are marketing cars pure and simply. They're selling a lifecycle, not a product, and some people buy into the lifecycle thing.
They are mediocre cars *at best*. I personally put them down there with korean cars. I think they are really poor autos.
We at least turn it on and make sure it works properly before sending. Which already gaurentees a much better experience than the customer gets. It's not fair, but a reviewer saying "I couldn't review XYZ because it failed to power on" makes a company look very bad.
Some reviewers will go to the effort of doing exchanges, but they will mention that in the review as well. As good as a company's customer support is, they would rather not remind the consumer that they'll be calling it.
Try this page as a starting point to identify who makes what for whom.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
A friend of mine manufactured boxes that converted SVGA to video, back when that was cool. The plan was that a PC could replace an expensive video production tool called a character generator, using all the fonts and dingbats available on the PC. He needed decoder chips, and a major Japanese manufacturer sent him some demo chips for his beta hatch of boards. They worked great! Far better than the specs. So he mortgaged his future and bought a bunch. But this second batch was bad news. Broadcasters, myself included, could not touch them. The second batch of chips obeyed the published specs, but the demo chips had apparently been hand picked to dazzle. I think he had to hold a fire sale, leave the biz, and put what he had left into Enron shares.
Hacker's already have logos. For the most part they can already be identified from the penguin to the daemon to the embrace of the term 'geek', 'nerd' and the sleep deprivation that the love of coding causes.
The need for some single unifying symbol is not there as when a hacker wants to find a hacker, he will find a hacker. Water seeks its own level, so hackers find hackers and build hacker groups to find more hackers. I mean geez, the internet should be proof alone of that.
And besides as with any other clique, the posers soon often reveal themselves before they can be rooted out. The sad truth is a logo would simply make it easier for a poser to pretend and then upon being rejected simply continue to pose though not to a hacker but to those outside the clique, which would only be to the detriment of the hacker , his friends and the world.
Okay that might be a bit grandiose but you get my point.
------- Thank you for your time, Rocko
AC...What gives? Do you need assistance? What part of you is so incapable of reasoned discourse? Are you a Linux zealot? A Windows Zealot? Neither? Do you abhor computers in favor of a typewriter? Where is your appreciation for others who share an interest in technology and computing...
I understand trolling is becoming a national pastime and all, but is there a middle ground for us? If you post the way you do for shits and giggles, I can totally accept that...and if you post the way you do because you are a miscreant I can totally accept that as well, but I really am interested...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
Ever look at the full color images at fast food restaurants?