[shuttertalk]

I thought this article was great - why 5 star ratings are usually mostly useless. I tend to agree - although there are two places where star ratings usually feature:

The first is used by "professional" review sites. If you look at sites like Dpreview their previous system before the current one used to equate to something like:

Excellent = Mindblowingly Exceptional
Highly Recommended = Good
Recommended = Bad

I find these tend to give star ratings towards the upper tier - never will you see average or below average ratings.


Secondly, there are sites where users post their reviews and the sites aggregate their reviews. These can be harder to interpret because users are usually fickle - 1 feature not working to their liking is enough to warrant a 1 star review. I find truly exceptional products have almost all 5 or 4 star reviews and very little 1-3s, while products to avoid are more evenly distributed throughout the 1-5 range (although they still do get 5 star reviews).

http://www.petapixel.com/2012/08/28/why-...ar-online/

Anyway, food for thought.

[NT73]

I use reviews as a guide, but you need to be realistic as you say.
Also the total number of reviews is relevant. I would guess you need over 200 to make it worth using, and then the percentage of bad (3-4-5) needs to be very low. There are always a few faults in mass produced electronics and mechanical items, but less faults means the chance of you getting a good one increases.

[slejhamer]

They are better than "like."

[matthew]

A very interesting article – I liked the cartoon when I saw it on XKCD, but they really did add to it.

Star ratings are an interesting idea that seems to have fallen down. The idea that a three-star review is now considered 'negative' still strikes me as odd, since if I give one of my photos three stars it's a moment for celebration.

I do find large collections of crowd reviews useful, though, including using the star ranking as a general indicator. A few personal examples that I've found:

- Shopping for a new short macro lens, I found one that was very well ranked at B&H and Amazon, but with very few long-form experiential reviews or bench-test reports. Looking more closely at the 5-star results, most of them used phrases like "much sharper than my 18-55", "great second lens", "first macro lens", and "great for insects", which no short macro will ever be. I decided that I wasn't the target market for this particular lens and moved on.

- Often people make comparisons to other products. When I was shopping for an audio recorder, I consistently saw people praising Product X – the one I was researching – for being half the price of Product Y and nearly as good. I had never heard of Product Y, but when I looked into it, it was consistently mentioned as better than Products V, W, X, and Z. I went with Y and have rarely regretted it.

- People are occasionally kind enough to qualify – or disqualify – their opinions. When someone gives a fast normal lens a bad rating, and then writes that two different samples of the lens showed back focus when used to photograph subjects one metre away at f/8, I know that they fundamentally don't understand the product that they bought and know that I can discount their low score. Very handy.

…and of course, sometimes crowdsourced reviews can be absolutely brilliant and worth reading at great length: http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/...ewpoints=1

[NT73]

We have a couple of those pens.