One of the things I think the Internet is great for is getting information on large ticket purchases. There is a multitude of resources for researching purchases. Product write ups, manufacturer web sites, and lastly (and arguably the best) consumer opinion. I really like sites that have a rating scale that aggregate the results of every person's review. Sometimes reviews contains tidbits of information that are not available in the product documentation, nor disclosed by the manufacturer. Sometimes it's a special setting to use, or it's a tip on what or what not to do. Other times it's a gripe that saves you from a huge headache.
These are the good reviews and there are reviews written by people that have no understanding of why they're submitting a review, yet alone how to write a review. I'm not saying that I'm the review-master. But when you're scanning through a ton of reviews, and you read something that's completely unrelated or not germane to the product, your time is being wasted.
I was recently looking for a few items online, some purchases I'm considering. The first item is a Canon Zoom Lens, an "L" series lens which is their top of the line, semi-professional lens. The one I'm looking at (drooling over) is priced at around $600 (retail price is over $1000) which is quite an expensive purchase. So naturally, I want to glean as much information as I can. While this is an entry level lens (read low end) in the "L" series, I still want to ensure that I know what I'm getting into. Looking at Amazon's reviews I see:
So it seems like it's got a favorable rating among people that have reviewed it. Over 100 reviews, cool. So now I'm really interested in people that have given it one, or two stars. Let's see why they didn't like it so much. I start to look for lower reviews, and see if I can come across a reason why it might have some downsides, and I come across this.
Are you kidding me? This review has nothing to do with the lens. So the guy gives the lens a two star review? What an idiot. What's even more shocking, that I just noticed, is that 4 people found the review helpful? WTF?
Another purchase I'm considering is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive to keep all my music, video, and photo media on. With a device like this, I'll be able to access the data from any machine on my network, and free up this space on my computers. I will probably even be able to use it as a backup device. While this device is not expensive as the previous, the function of this one is almost more important to me, it's something I'm likely to use almost daily.
So I'm considering a LaCie 301138U 500GB Ethernet Disk mini NAS. It retails at newegg for just shy of $200. The reviews are almost all favorable, and I like how newegg lays it out. Looks like 80% of the people gave it a high rating (8 of 10) and 20% of the people said it was average (2 of 10). After reading each review since there were only 10, it seems like a good deal for me, and I'll give it a shot. Newegg is really good about returns, so if it does not work out, I'll return it.
All of the reviews were written well, nobody complained about FedEx or anything stupid like that. I'll have a post soon about setting up iTunes and media and sharing them between workstations on a network. It seems like it should be really simple, but my guess is that I'll run into some issues.