Canon Tries To Shut Down "Fake" Canon Blog 125
Thomas Hawk writes "An interesting twist over at the Fake Chuck Westfall Blog. Fake Chuck (like Fake Steve before him) has a blog out parodying Canon's real Technical Information Advisor Chuck Westfall. It seems that Canon and their lawyers over at Loeb & Loeb are none too fond of all the fun that Fake Chuck and DSLR geeks everywhere have been having at their expense and have sent Fake Chuck's blog hosting company, WordPress, a notice to take the blog down. Canon's lawyers cite that Fake Chuck's blog is 'calculated to mislead recipients,' even though the blog has 'fake' in the title, 'fake' in the URL and 'fake' just about everywhere else in the blog. What in the heck is wrong with Canon? Do they really think that trying to shut down a parody blog is going to make their new 5D Mark II ship any faster?" After Fake Chuck removed the Canon logo from his site, WordPress is standing behind him and has rebuffed Canon's demand.
Re:MS fakery (Score:5, Interesting)
Fwd: Thanks for the heads up about your blog! (Score:3, Interesting)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sam Johnston <samj-at-".net>
Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 9:31 PM
Subject: Thanks for the heads up about your blog!
To: Chuck Westfall <cwestfall@cusa.canon.com>
Cc: Toni Scheinder <toni@automattic.com>, "Douglas E. Mirell" <dmirell@loeb.com>
G'day Chuck,
It's not every day that something truly entertaining comes to my
attention but thanks to my mates at Slashdot[1] and your mates at Loeb
& Loeb with their (surely fake?) letter[2] I was drawn attention to
your refreshingly entertaining fake blog[3]. Anyway I'm sure I'm one
of many who have immediately added your blog to my reader - it's truly
amazing what a bit of viral marketing can do for you!
Kodos to the guys at Automattic too for identifying the letter for
what it was so quickly and taking appropriate action - those guys
rock!
Eagerly awaiting your next post,
Your [virtual] friend,
Sam
1. http://fakechuckwestfall.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/982873542.pdf [wordpress.com]
2. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/15/1830217 [slashdot.org]
3. http://fakechuckwestfall.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
Re:You'd think by now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely! Canon are hurting as they've had nothing but immense quality problems with almost every major model released in the last 2 years. Canon just cannot stand being called out as making 'fake' cameras and watch their user base walk over to real Nikon.
FACT: On a Luminous Landscapes trip to Antarctica, ZERO Nikon D700 failures, 6(six) Canon 5Dii failures of which 3 recovered and 3 were bricked.
Can you smell the PANIC back at Canon HQ?
Re:WTF (Score:1, Interesting)
You know, I went to that link and was dismayed that so much emphasis was placed on what was owned. I shot a lot back in the Stone Age and always deflected equipment questions because they are of no merit. What is of merit is the quality of the work produced and the few pictures I saw on that page look no better than PHO-202 student work. The technical aspects might be bang on, but I'll thank the hardware for that, not the photographer. Those images provided no engagement, no questions. They were pretty, like much of Ansel Adams's work (which, if you haven't noticed, rarely contained people.)
It is obvious to anyone in the biz that the Big Names are in a fight to the death. They know that there is an enormous amount of money out there in even the amateur ranks, let alone the pro-sumer, and it is easy to relieve some person of thousands of dollars by making various technological claims for your product vs. a different product.
Photography for me has always been a very personal method of exploring the world. Much of my work meant a lot to me. Some meant enough to others that they were willing to pay a good deal of money for a print, although money is probably a very poor metric of value.
In any event, considering as I am to pick up a camera again, I don't know if I'm interested in any of the digital dreadnoughts now being pushed farther and farther down-market. Marvels they are, but I see them impotent in pushing ahead any kind of frontier of photography; visual, emotional or psychological. And even if they could I suspect the viewing public is existentially emasculated anyway, so advances are moot.
Maybe an F or M6 full of Tri-X. Art's even better when married to alchemy...
Re:Guess business is kinda slow (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:WTF (Score:1, Interesting)
They're not yet met, but getting there. You're after a 25MP+ full frame. There is the Canon EOS 5D mk II, which is 21 MP, and the Nikon D3X, which is 24.5 MP. (That's the top of the line from Nikon, and one-shade-from-top for Canon.)
However, generally the lens is less sharp than the current generation of sensors anyway.
Plus, you can usually not print anywhere near these megapixel ratings unless you're printing very large format or very small crops, it's not really that useful or as important as you might at first think.
6"x4"x400dpi is 2400px x 1600px, or 3.84 MP - cellphone cameras can be better than this!
Concentrating on MP for photographic quality is a little like concentrating on MHz for computer performance - only relevant when all else is equal and isn't the bottleneck.