I was an audio-geek for a while, and I found that my favorite speakers were almost always the next pair I tried. No joke. I liked hearing something new. I think I'm the same way with cameras. The next camera is my favorite, in that it is a bit of an adventure in figuring out how it works (and works best) and learning to relate to it.
That's kind of how I feel about it too and part of why I've really enjoyed being cut in on B&H's program. I guess Amin's reluctance is my gain!
It's not so much that the next camera is necessarily my favorite, but I really enjoy the "adventure in figuring out how it works (and works best) and learning to relate to it". I think most modern cameras are pretty ingenious and quite well thought out, even if some of them aren't particularly well designed for my personal wants and needs - that's OK, I don't think my wants and needs are all that common!
And Amin, if you ever decide you want to get more into it (or have more TIME to), I don't think you have to necessarily look at it as a negative endeavor, that you have to find things to criticize. I just look at it with the basic assumption that they're pretty much ALL
good, but they're all
different too, and those differences can be worth exploring and explaining as a way to help people figure out which options might work for them. In the few years I've been back into photography in a big way, I've tried a LOT of cameras and I don't think I've found more than a couple that I just didn't like much, and there was nothing wrong with those - just didn't work well for me. Then again, what I do is nothing like a formal review, just user impressions with a heavy built-in bias based on my specific shooting habits, which I try to be up front about. I'm interested in the basic tech of a how a camera works but even my technical analysis tends to be down to eyeball level "how's it look" kind of stuff rather than a test lab level of tech analysis. I don't think you have to feel obligated to find a lot of negatives if there aren't any (or many), but just explaining what works well and what could work a bit better.
And cool new features are always nice to discover. The auto-ISO implementation on the new Nikon Coolpix A is the best I've run across yet and I think it should be a model for every camera out there. I can't even imagine a way it could be made better. I understand Nikon has been using a similar or identical approach in their DSLR's for a while now, but this is my first exposure to it. And it just makes me wonder why any camera would impose more limits on a feature with as much potential as auto-ISO has with today's amazing sensors. Its so good and so intuitive it actually bums me out to think about how close both the Ricoh GR and the Sony RX1 come to doing it as well and how close they are to getting it right, but with some critical gaps in each. And even sort of makes me mad at how lame Fuji's implementation of auto ISO is, even on the new cameras that at least provide a decent interface for it (after how dreadful the X100 was in this regard). I even started to write a piece specifically about different ways of implementing auto-ISO and the tradeoffs involved, but after three pages I realized I was just writing to help clarify my own thinking and understanding and no sane person would ever want to read such a thing! But that process was fun and filled with discovery for a camera geek like me and led to a better understanding of the potential of this newly useful feature and how few camera makers have really figured out how to make it most useful.
I'm pretty sure if you had the time to devote, you'd get into this stuff at LEAST as much as I do! Its not about being negative or critical necessarily, but about puzzling these new contraptions out!
-Ray