Consider boycotting globalcentral.com!

The eglobalcentral.com websites are online vendors of electronics, photo equipment, etc. They have very low prices, which attract a lot of customers, even if their delivery times are very long: several weeks during which you will receive no information whatsoever on the status of your order, until it shows up on your doorstep.

Moreover, they try to "play local" by having country-specific versions of their website: they have one for Belgium, for example, so that Belgians will think they have a subsidiary established in their country, and they have one in France to induce the same kind of trust in French customers. They also have many other "national" sites, and they probably have one painted to the colors of your own country...

Finally, in order to convince the European customers that they are firmly established in Europe, they ostensibly ship their merchandise from a UK warehouse.

However, that is all window-dressing.

The truth is eglobalcentral lie to their customers.

They are established in China, more specifically in Hong Kong, and when you order something from them, the long delivery delay is because they first have to ship the product from Hong Kong to the UK, then ship it again from that UK warehouse to you.

And that long wait is not the worse aspect of things, far from it.

Imagine that upon receiving it, you realize that the product you have ordered is not suitable, and you want to return it. Of course, you can, can you not? Yes, but... you will be forced to return it TO HONG KONG, not to the UK warehouse that shipped it to you, which means you will have to pay around 50 euros in shipping costs —and more if the package is a bit heavy!

This is sheer extortion. Eglobalcentral know very well that offsetting  50 euros or more for shipping costs will, in many cases, defeat the whole purpose of returning the product, and they are counting on that to minimize the number of returns.

This is an unfair commercial practice, and unacceptable in this day and age. This is customer entrapment, and this is why I will from now on boycott eglobalcentral and never, ever purchase anything from any of their sites again.

I urge you to do the same, because only this sort of customer pressure will make them change the way they do business. LET'S ALL BOYCOTT EGLOBALCENTRAL!

I will of course file a complaint with the competent French authorities, as I am located in France, and with the European Consumer Center (www.europe-consommateurs.eu).

La bêtise de la FNAC dépasse les bornes…

Cela fait déjà bien longtemps qu’à mes yeux, comme à ceux de nombre de ses anciens clients, la FNAC a perdu son attrait, que ce soit en termes de produits disponibles ou de prix… pour ne rien dire du service après-vente et de la relation-client en général, domaines dans lesquels elle est depuis belle lurette supplantée et dépassée de nombreuses longueurs par Amazon.

Quant au fameux “vendeur FNAC”, dont on vantait jadis la compétence et la courtoisie, il y a longtemps qu'il a été lui aussi brocardé par de multiples clients; les enquêtes qui ont révélé qu'il orientait davantage le choix du client en fonction des marges réalisées sur tel ou tel produit, qu'en fonction de l'adéquation dudit produit aux besoins du client, n’ont pas non plus fait de bien à l’enseigne.

Tout cela, la FNAC le sait tellement bien que, pour espérer rester encore un peu dans le jeu concurrentiel et demeurer un tant soit peu attractive, elle s’est trouvée contrainte de faire appel à des vendeurs tiers afin de créer une “marketplace”, ici encore pour tenter d’émuler Amazon, à la traîne de laquelle peinent la plupart des détaillants de nos jours.

 

En dépit de cette position peu flatteuse, il s’avère que j’effectue parfois un achat sur le site de la FNAC. Pas auprès de la FNAC elle-même, non, pour les raisons déjà évoquées, mais auprès de l’un des susdits vendeurs tiers, dont il peut se trouver occasionnellement qu’ils ont en stock ce que je cherche à un prix concurrentiel. Rare can be found, comme le disait, je crois, une ancienne pub pour le whisky J & B.

C’est ainsi que j’ai récemment passé commande sur cette “marketplace” d’une batterie supplémentaire pour mon Nikon Z7.

Dans la foulée, je reçois un mail qui me dit que ma commande a été enregistrée. Jusque là, rien que de très normal.

Mais voilà-t-y pas que, quelques minutes plus tard, j’en reçois un deuxième pour me dire que ma commande A ÉTÉ ACCEPTÉE…! Si, si! Victoire!

On croit rêver ! Non, sérieusement, ma commande a été acceptée ? Quel coup de bol! C’est vrai, quoi, elle avait toutes les chances (ou plutôt: tous les risques) d’être refusée, au départ… On en voit tous les jours, des marchands qui refusent de prendre l’argent des clients et disent : “Ah, ben non, désolé ! Je ne veux pas de votre commande !” J’ai vraiment eu de la chance de passer au travers.

Franchement, on s’interroge sur le niveau de bêtise crasse de l’imbécile qui a pondu un mail-type comme ça… pour ne rien dire de la neuneuserie affligeante de ses supérieurs qui ont approuvé (en novlangue: “validé”) cette idée.

 

Tiens, au fait, j’ai une bonne nouvelle pour vous : si vous avez pu lire cet article sur mon blog, c’est parce que vous avez été accepté en tant que lecteur. Sympa de ma part, non? Ben oui, j’aurais pu facilement ne pas vouloir de vous, après tout, non ?

Comme je le dis souvent (et, hélas ! de plus en plus souvent…), par moments, je me demande comment on a réussi un jour à sortir des cavernes…

How to get more views on Flickr

Hello everyone,

I haven’t posted here in quite a while, I know and I apologize about this. Going into “retirement from active duty” is a big change, and many adjustments had to be made; others still need to be. Additionally, we have had the painters at the house for weeks to undertake major redecoration works which will only (and finally!) be finished by the end of this week.

Also, those who give me the pleasure of following what I post on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/d_robert/) know that I have been away on photo trips, first to Sardinia for three weeks in March and April, then to Scotland for ten days around the end of April. The selection and processing of photos also take up quite a bit of time, as I like to do things with care whenever I can. And now, I can afford this supreme luxury: have and take TIME, and yet sometimes there hardly seems to be enough of that…!

Anyway, I was on the subject of Flickr, which is the only “social” thing I do online, as I do not appreciate the so-called “social media” and do not wish to be present there —the sole exception being, possibly, Instagram because it is predominantly photo-related (or so they tell me), but then it seems so complicated uploading things to their platform from a desktop computer that I have given up. Would you believe a “social medium” centered on photography, that would only accept uploads from the worst cameras that exist nowadays (i.e., cell phones), and not from the best cameras, unless you find a way to make Instagram believe that the desktop computer on which you have carefully processed your photos, with its high quality, calibrated monitor and its suite of sophisticated and powerful retouching software… is actually a cell phone?

Me, I cannot believe nor understand it. But such is life. When Instagram come to their senses one day (maybe) and accept uploads from computers, I will reconsider, but I don’t wish to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to cheat my way into uploading nice photographs instead of the crappy smartphone snapshots they willingly accept.

What was I saying? Ah! yes, Flickr. My main concern there is to post good quality photos —well, the kind I regard as being good quality, based on my “National Geographic-like” standards. Do I get many views? A fair amount, yes. Would I undertake efforts to increase those views using “popularity schemes”? Certainly not. I belong to the groups I like (and know) on Flickr, I’m sure I’m missing quite a few that would be of interest, but I don’t intend to do anything else or more than post to those groups I belong to, and which I update from time to time, in particular when I discover that a group had a sole admin who has suddenly lost interest and left their group to turn into an uncurated photo dump, which is frankly stupid and disrespectful for the loyal contributors to that group.

So, basically I follow my own chosen path, welcoming those who are happy to tread along with me for a while, but not making any efforts to gather followers.

Now, recently, several of my photos have been selected to go into this thing that is called “Explore”. I have no clue how a photo gets there, but so many people talk about it like the Holy Grail of Flickr that I went and had a look. It appears to be a special gallery made up of recently uploaded photos selected by some mysterious algorithm, and quite a few of those are really excellent indeed (some are also pretty bad, but popular). Photos that are selected for the Explore gallery immediately get thousands of views, and that’s how I spot that one of mine has been so chosen. Plus, people tell you in comments and invite the photo to “In Explore” groups.

Anyway, this morning one of mine was selected, and among the people who “faved” it, I noticed a strange user name (people are not mandated to use their actual names on Flickr) that included a phrase about thanking people for x million views. This is a new ploy on Flickr, and I have seen several cheesy types use it: if their user name is, say, “Charlie”, they will change it into something like “Charlie thanks for 10 million views”. Of course, it’s not really about thanking people, as you have guessed: it is solely about bragging about their 10 million views.

This is cheap and mediocre, but so is most of the human race, unfortunately. Panem et circenses. Along the same lines, the verb “share”, which expresses a wonderful concept, is one of the most corrupted nowadays: most people do not want to actually “share” their photos with you, they want to use them to show off and hope that you will admire them. That’s what “sharing” truly means to most people nowadays.

And so, there was this guy “faving” my Explored photo this morning, with a phrase thanking people for x million views in his user name, and since the number of views he boasted about was quite high, I went to have a look at all the wonders he certainly had in his Flickr gallery… Well, he only had about 200 pictures, most of them ugly snapshots, quite a few of them politically oriented against terror and condemning terror attacks —nothing wrong with that, of course, but the photographic quality simply wasn’t there.

I was puzzled. How could someone with such a meager and mediocre portfolio have attracted so many views? I quickly understood: the guy is following 18,700 other people on Flickr, and as most people return the favor when someone follows them (I don’t necessarily), he also has 18,400 followers…!

That’s the trick! When you have thousands and thousands of followers (which you have induced into following you simply because you have followed them first, doesn’t matter if you never go again to look at their photos!), statistically it will snowball into millions of views, just because SOME of them will occasionally click on one of your photos…

So, now you know: you want millions of views on Flickr, doesn’t matter if your portfolio is shitty, just stoop to following everyone in sight, watch most of them follow you in return, and behold the counter of views going up…

Life is great, decidedly!

The ugly fashion of thick female eyebrows

Fashion is a concept I’ve always found difficult to understand. As a human being, you’d think you would and should want to be yourself, and not too much like the others; particularly where being attractive to the other sex is concerned, you’d think one should and would want to be unique, to differentiate themselves from the next person, instead of doing whatever possible to look as much alike as possible...

Apparently, though, good common sense is not relevant where fashion is concerned. Have some garment industry moguls decided, via the “inspired” voices of some fashion gurus, that skinny jeans were the thing to be seen in now? Let’s all of us buy and wear them, so we can all look alike. Tomorrow, it’ll be mini-skirts, or platform shoes, or the Devil only knows whatever else.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the masses see fit to follow those fashions, as the said masses are not particularly remarkable for their intelligence. Most of the genus homo erectus are indeed quite dumb, not to mention quite lacking in self-assurance and good taste, and those character traits combine to make them very likely to simply imitate what they see the next person doing —which, as already pointed out, is baffling to me: not only do they wear the same things as their neighbors, without regard for whether their silhouette benefits from it, but they readily endorse, without even thinking (but do they ever?), practices that are even much more radical, such as piercings (ah, those rings in the nose that makes women look so much like the cows of my childhood —how utterly ridiculous!), and more recently tattoos. How ugly and decaying will those tattoos look when the concerned ladies reach their mid-thirties and their skin becomes less taut and starts to wrinkle? And by then, they will still have the major part of their lives to live together with those Dorian Gray avatars “adorning” their bodies...

Being into photography, I obviously have dozens of photos staring me in the face every single day, unless I myself am out shooting. Among them, and particularly in my Flickr groups, are female portraits. And since maybe a year or so, I have begun to notice the emergence of a sad and ugly new fashion, which is that of THICK EYEBROWS.

Now, eyebrows on a woman can be a very attractive feature; they contribute to giving a face its singularity, its character. If one main role had to be attributed to them, it would be to showcase the most important component of the face: the eyes. For a very long time, it was well understood that eyebrows were not supposed to steal the show, and had to be kept under control. For once, good common sense was at work there, and women diligently plucked their eyebrows to shape them the way they liked.

However, recently, some dumber-than-usual concept came out that female eyebrows needed to be thick and heavy, in order to look fashionable. Now, I have heard it many times when I was young and honesty had not yet given precedence to political correctness (and therefore I will repeat it for historical reasons), that the world of fashion was ruled by homosexual males who had no vested interest in making females look genuinely beautiful and attractive. I have no idea regarding the accuracy of the latter phrase, but it is true that whoever came up with this idea that female eyebrows had to be thick and bushy has not done them a favor, as I have rarely seen anything uglier.

The women who diligently follow that diktät (and there are very many of them!), not only let them eyebrows grow as thick and bushy as they can, but also actually augment them in thickness and bushiness if they think they don’t look big and thick enough by themselves...! Yuck.

The thing is, while they grow and exhibit overgrown bushes on their brows, they still pluck, shave and/or was away any sign of hair almost everywhere else... So, is body hair attractive, or is it not?

Let us all pray that a modicum of good taste will soon prevail over sheer stupidity, and that otherwise charming ladies will cease to emulate Martin Scorsese Andy Rooney, because it does nothing to make them more attractive to most men.

Me and my five (so far!) Nikon Z7

The Nikon Z7 is a great camera, with the upcoming firmware update(s) it’s going to be even greater, and I won’t sing its praises here, others on the Internet are and have been doing it much better than I could hope to.

There is one thing, though, that bothers me: supported languages. And this is what this article is about, so that you can avoid making the same mistakes as I.

So, I bought my first Z7 mid-November 2018, just in time for my December photo trip to Brittany. Now, what is the first thing you do when you receive a new digital camera these days, after charging the battery, that is? You open the menus and start configuring it to make it more your own, and make it work the way you want.

And as soon as I started doing that, I discovered that the menus on my Z7 were in English and Chinese. Only.

Now, that doesn’t really bother me personally, as I’m used to configuring all my cameras in English, which is like a second native tongue to me, and which makes it a lot easier as most of the camera-related content found on the Web is in English anyway, so having the camera set up in English already makes it easier to try out the various tips I may stumble upon, but... but... when the day to resell it comes, what do I do, in France, surrounded by French-speaking, Italian-speaking, German-speaking, Spanish-speaking potential customers?

Obviously, it is going to be a problem.

So, I think “OK, my bad, I should have checked/asked, I’m not going to return it now as with scarce inventories, there won’t be time to obtain another one before I go to Brittany, I will procure another one later and resell this one with English only, hoping to take advantage of the fact that it will still be a very new camera to find a buyer that will be OK with English only...”

With a couple of weeks to spare before my trip, I chanced and ordered a second Z7 from the FNAC marketplace vendor Infinity Pro, which claimed to have the camera in stock... but finally decided to reimburse my3,431 euros as they could not procure the Z7...! The claim was false, obviously.

Not daunted (how stupid can one be?), I ordered a third Z7 from the E-global Central Belgium online vendor. I waited days and days, no one answering my emails, no one giving me any news (in spite of having promptly debited my VISA card!), and suddenly I was informed that my 3,018 euros were going to be reimbursed!

Considering the obvious difficulties to obtain this camera, I decided to wait until after Christmas, and so on January 7, I ordered my fourth Z7 from UK online vendor Progadgets KCS. UK vendors have very good prices because they source their products from Hong Kong, and there must be some special customs arrangement between the UK and their former colony, so that goods may enter the European Union without paying VAT, or something like that... Better hurry if one wants to take advantage of this, because after the Brexit, it will be too late...

Anyway, this time I had done my homework and asked about supported languages. That vendor had been very reactive and had listed five or six languages in their email, so I thought I was safe, but when I received the camera and began to configure it, I discovered that, in fact, what I had mistaken for the beginning of a long list of languages, was in fact the full list. And so, there was, in addition to English and Chinese, Dutch and Portuguese, which was already an improvement, but no German, no Italian, no Spanish, etc.

In other words, I was not really better off. I had to send it back, and I am expecting reimbursement (this time, of 3,031 euros) as I write this.

I have now sworn that the Progadgets KCS thing was going to be my last mistake, and therefore I have sent emails all over the place, asking vendors for an EXHAUSTIVE list of the supported language, and this allowed me to find out that Nikon have implemented really strange policies regarding the languages supported in the menus of the Z cameras: the reduced cost copies that come into Europe via Hong Kong are usually only in English and Chinese, and some also have Dutch, Portuguese and some strange languages that look like Hindu or Burmese...

Of course, I can always go to a “legitimate” Nikon dealership in France. Only today, I received an answer from Objectif Bastille, a well-known retailer in Paris (where I bought, in fact, my Z-mount 35mm f/1.8 S lens), detailing the supported languages, and they’re all there: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, German, English, French, Spanish, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serb, Finnish, etc. In other words, all the languages I have, for example, on my D850. But then, the price of the Z7 plus an FTX adapter is 3,850 euros, which is quite a different deal...

At this point, my last hope is some obscure retailer in the Canary Islands, but they seem to keep strange business hours and I am still waiting for them to answer my query about the supported languages. If that fails, I will have no choice but to pay full price.

So, in conclusion, if you see some great buying opportunities on the Internet, make sure you ask the right questions and obtain the right answers in writing before you let them take your money...!

EDIT: After Progadgets KCS, I was once more taken in by inaccurate representations from an online vendor, this time Duke Fotografia in Las Palmas, Canary Island (Spain) as, in spite of my having asked (repeatedly!) the very specific question about languages supported in the menus), I was still sent a Z7 which only had English, French, Spanish and Portuguese...! I had to send it back once again, and then I decided to go to a very official Nikon authorized reseller in the city of Lyons, and actually look at the “Languages” item in the Setup menu: sure enough, dozens of European languages were listed, just as on my D850. I bought that Z7, which is going to be THE ONE for me —at last!

Pourquoi je ne (re-)voterai pas LREM aux européennes, ni Macron à la présidentielle

Pour deux raisons simples:

. Le 80 km/h. Puisque, de l'aveu même de Macron, “c’est une connerie” (sic), comme il l’a admis devant des élus à la mi-décembre 2018 (propos rapportés par le maire de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, non démenti par l’Élysée), eh bien soit il fallait rapporter la mesure, soit il faudra assumer les conséquences (notamment électorales) de la “connerie”.

. La désindexation des retraites. En mettant fin à l'augmentation automatique des retraites dans les mêmes proportions que le coût de la vie (et pas davantage!), Macron organise et institutionnalise la spoliation prévisible, assumée et massive de millions de retraités, qui ont pendant des décennies trimé pour assurer la prospérité du pays, tout en payant des cotisations qui ont alimenté les retraites de leurs propres parents —indexées, celles-là!. Et c’est également stupide du point de vue économique, car les retraités, ne l’oublions pas, sont aussi des consommateurs, que ce soit pour eux-mêmes ou pour leurs proches, enfants et petits-enfants... et il y en aura de plus en plus, avec le vieillissement de la population! On se tire donc doublement une balle dans le pied, alors même que l’on sait que la consommation est un des principaux moteurs de la croissance.

Pour ces deux raisons, je donnerai donc mon suffrage à d’autres, le jour venu... et je serai très loin d’être le seul, à en juger par la cote de popularité historiquement basse de Macron et de Philippe.

Miss Numérique, c’est fini !

J’ai été pendant plusieurs années un client assez fidèle de Miss Numérique, ce revendeur de produits techniques installé en Lorraine. J’y achetais essentiellement du matériel photo, et au fil des ans, j’y ai sans nul doute dépensé plusieurs milliers d’euros. Le service était correct, les prix aussi, et jusqu’à présent je n’avais eu aucune raison de leur retourner le moindre produit.

C’est dire que mon «profil client» chez eux doit être excellent.

Il y a quelques jours, je vois sur Internet quelqu’un vanter les mérites d'un petit flash, le Godox TT350 pour Nikon. Je l’achète chez Miss Numérique. Las! ce petit flash, par ailleurs très sympa, est visiblement incompatible avec mon déclencheur radio Phottix Odin II, en tous cas c’est ce que je constate après avoir tout essayé pour qu’ils «se parlent», sans succès.

Or, je n’utilise quasiment jamais de flash sur un boîtier-photo, car je trouve déplaisant l’éclairage frontal ainsi généré —et si d’aventure je voulais le faire, j’ai un flash Nikon SB-900 qui ferait bien mieux le boulot qu’un petit Godox. Donc, l’utilisation en mode dit «flash déporté» est impérative pour moi: il faut que je puisse brancher l'émetteur Phottix Odin II sur mon boîtier (Nikon D850 ou Z7), que je puisse brancher le flash sur le récepteur Odin II, et que je puisse ainsi, non seulement déclencher le flash à distance par radio, mais encore le régler également à distance, afin d’éviter des allers-et-retours entre le boîtier et le flash déporté.

Rien à faire avec ce petit Godox: les deux marques hongkongaises sont incompatibles. Je me résous donc à le retourner.

C’est alors que je découvre, à ma grande stupeur, que Miss Numérique prétend me faire supporter les frais de retour...! Je n’en crois pas mes yeux, mais pourtant, en lisant et relisant leur politique commerciale, il n’y a, hélas! pas de doute: je vais devoir remplir un formulaire Colissimo et affranchir à mes frais, là où Amazon, non seulement ne me fait rien payer, mais en plus me fournit une étiquette-retour toute préparée que je n'ai plus qu’à imprimer!

Je passe sur le fait qu’il me faut, en plus, écrire un numéro de retour de manière bien visible sur le paquet, et communiquer avec le service Clients de Miss Numérique via une interface sur leur site qui ne permet pas de garder trace du message envoyé, alors qu’avec Amazon, il suffit de répondre au mail qu'ils envoient...

Décidément, je constate une nouvelle fois qu’Amazon est clairement en avance sur tous ses concurrents... Pas étonnant qu’il les bouffe tout crus. Et je n’ai toujours pas la moindre action chez eux, je m’empresse de le préciser.

Pour moi, Miss Numérique, c’est fini: si je dois en passer par ces procédures d’un autre âge pour renvoyer un produit, je préfère aller acheter ailleurs. Et je vous encourage à faire de même, cette politique me paraissant, de nos jours, inacceptable.

Il faut le voir pour le croire...!

J'ai commandé hier, pour un coût de plusieurs milliers d'euros (dommage d'ailleurs que cela n'ait pas été pour, disons, 600 euros, car j'aurais pu vous le prononcer sans faire la liaison, vous savez: six cents h-euros... comme tout le monde, quoi!), un appareil-photo à un vendeur de la fameuse “place de marché” (odieux néologisme!) de la FNAC, la société Infinity Pro.

Infinity Bêtise serait plus approprié.

L'appareil en question était en stock, cela va de soi, sinon je ne l'aurais pas commandé.

Je passe sur le fait qu'avant de passer commande, j'ai posé trois questions précises et simples sans obtenir les réponses que ces questions appelaient... et aujourd'hui, je reçois un mail m'annonçant... accrochez-vous bien... vous êtes assis?... m'annonçant que ma commande a été acceptée!

Si, je vous le jure ! Regardez:

Quel soulagement n'ai-je pas éprouvé en apprenant cette exaltante nouvelle! Pensez un peu: ma commande aurait pu être refusée! Ben si, quoi... D'accord, l'objet était en stock, comme je l'ai précisé. Mais le vendeur aurait pu, je ne sais pas, moi, faire la mauvaise tête, ne ps avoir entendu le réveil, s'être disputé avec sa petite amie... Autrement dit, il y avait des dizaines de raisons pour lesquelles il aurait pu refuser de me vendre ce que je voulais acheter.

Comment? Que dites-vous, au fond de la classe? Le refus de vente est illégal? Eh bien, dites-moi, vous, vous êtes au taquet, hein! Vous donnez tout, mais vous ne lâchez rien! Joli tour de force.

Décidément, la neuneuserie généralisée gagne du terrain, comme on peut le voir tous les jours au volant, devant la TV, ou en faisant nos courses (à l'image de ce haïssable “Je vous laisse insérer votre carte...” scripté par tous les formateurs de France et de Navarre, formule standard répétée à l'envi par tous les vendeurs et toutes les vendeuses de tout). Et Infinity Pro Neuneu figure en bonne place parmi ce valeureux contingent.

“Votre commande a été acceptée”...! Celle-là, elle va me faire rigoler pendant quelques jours...

Les dernières astuces des spammeurs

Le spam, c'est-à-dire l'envoi de courriels non sollicités aux fins de tenter de vous vendre quelque chose, est de plus en plus encadré, réglementé, prohibé, puni. Le RGDP étant le dernier acte, et le plus visible, de l'armada juridique anti-spam qui se met peu à peu en place, avec plus ou moins de succès, d'ailleurs.

Face à cela, les sociétés (au moins celles qui tiennent un peu à leur réputation) ont de plus en plus de mal à nous envoyer, dans des conditions défendables, leurs multiples mailings publicitaires.

Depuis quelques mois cependant, une nouvelle phraséologie a fait son apparition, pour tenter de sauver les apparences: on nous écrit “It appears that you have subscribed to commercial messages from Company XXXX...”, autrement dit “Il semble que vous avez demandé à recevoir des messages commerciaux de la part de la société XXXX...”

Bien entendu, ce n'est jamais vrai, vous n'avez rien demandé du tout, mais au moins, cela permet de faire croire à un semblant de légalité: le spam n'est pas illégal, puisque c'est le destinataire lui-même qui a demandé à recevoir le message... Bien sûr, aussitôt après, on précise que, si ce n'est pas le cas, eh bien on est vraiment désolé, ça doit être une erreur, cliquez ici pour vous désinscrire, blab-bla-bla... mais entretemps, il n'empêche que le message publicitaire est quand même passé, vous l'avez quand même ouvert, et peut-être certains d'entre vous se sont-ils laissé tenter... auquel cas, l'offensive de pub illégale a atteint son but!

Je prédis à ce "it appears that you have subscribed..." un bel avenir, car avec la plus grande mauvaise foi du monde, les spammeurs et autres importuns peuvent se draper derrière les apparences de la simple erreur du bonne foi: oups, on s'est trompé, vraiment navré, hein...!

Je me demande combien de temps cela va durer avant que des sanctions réglementaires et/ou judiciaires commencent à tomber, et qu'est-ce qu'ils vont bien pouvoir trouver ensuite...

Mirrorless : switching from Fuji to Nikon

Now that Nikon has launched its full-frame mirrorless cameras, and now that it has been confirmed that motorized F-mount lenses will be fully usable on the Z cameras (with the added benefit of in-body stabilization!), it makes sense for me to seriously contemplate getting rid of all my lightweight Fujifilm equipment.

One major caveat is, however, the electronic viewfinder. Until now, I never wanted to part with my Fuji X-Pro 2, mostly because of its superior optical/electronic viewfinder. The Nikon Z7 only has an electronic viewfinder. It was praised by most of the people who have handled the new camera so far, but I found one professional photographer who had this to say:

“However, there was one thing that I really struggled with: the EVF brightness. When you look through the viewfinder of a DSLR, you see the scene at the same brightness as with your bare eye. With an EVF that's different because you're basically looking at a miniature Live View monitor, and you need to set the brightness level for that yourself. Several times I found myself being fooled by the brightness of the EVF, tricking me into thinking that I shot a nice and bright image with tons of shadow detail, whereas in reality the image was actually horribly underexposed. While it is true that one look at the histogram would tell me this, in the heat of the moment that sometimes did not compute.

At first, I started to change the brightness level of the EVF to match what I was seeing, but that didn't prove to be a definitive solution either. I ended up more or less ignoring the brightness level of the image in the EVF and only use it for composition, light direction, focus, depth of field, and instead relying on the histogram for exposure. Overall, I would say the default setting of the EVF is too bright.”

This is not fully reassuring; it is exactly as I feared. And so, I will have to wait until I go to Paris and am able to have look myself through a Z7 viewfinder, to see if I can live with it or not.

I will also wait for all the hype and urgency to die down a bit and for the prices to relax as well. I will keep reading the reviews, especially those having to do with the viewfinder and the performance of F-mount lenses, which I’m sure will be quite good —I just want to see how good exactly, because there is just one small chance that it might not satisfy…

In the meantime, I will soon be putting up for sale my entire Fuji kit, which comprises an X-Pro 2 body, 4 or 5 batteries, various accessories, and the following lenses:

Fujinon 16 mm f/1.4

Fujinon 23mm f/1.4

Fujinon 35 mm f/1.4

Fujinon 56 mm f/1.2

Fujinon 90 mm f/2

Fujinon 55~200 mm