DarkKnightNine said:
One thing I have learned from living in Asia since I retired from the military is that western people can be abusive for no other reason than just wanting to be abusive.
I've been fortunate to experience many different cultures, and there is some truth to your observations. IMHO, Westerners, and particularly Americans, tend to get overly defensive and interpret simple observations as criticism. That's why there's such a backlash to a thread like yours. Even Brits that visit America will often comment on how thin-skinned their cross-Atlantic counterparts can be at times
I wouldn't take it too personally.
Not to mention the comment that almost all of you seem to overlook is that I spoke directly with Canon Execs and played with the camera literally three days before the camera's official release and even they told me it wasn't perfected yet.
I'm no expert when it comes to the world of manufacturing cameras, but I don't think a scenario like this is all that uncommon. IMHO, regardless of whether you're launching a new camera, car, phone or TV set, if your deadline is say 3/2/12, you will be working out last minute bugs until 11:59 pm on 3/1/12.
I was on a public relations photo shoot for launch of the brand new 2012 Acura TL last year. I wasn't good enough to be the photog, merely the assistant, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. In a typical PR shoot like this, a manufacturer will fly a photog in a few days before the car is unveiled to journalists, and have a bunch of PR shots taken for the media outlets to use, since they usually don't bring their own photographers.
The two cars we were shooting were the only two 2012 Acura TLs in America at the time, and as soon as they got off the boat from Japan, they were shipped to our location. The dozen or so TLs that the journalists were supposed to drive in just two days were still in transit. Let's just say pre-production cars like this always have some flaws. The leather doesn't match, the GPS doesn't work, the shock valving might not be perfected, and the engine management calibrations may need further tweaks, just to give you a few examples. Mind you, this is just 1-2 months before the cars are ready to hit the showrooms, and just days before journalists will be picking them apart in their reviews. IMHO, there are a lot more things that can go wrong when designing a car from scratch than when designing a camera.
Likewise, when I was on the press launch for the '05 Mustang many years ago, Ford mentioned that the cars were not yet emissions certified because they were still working on the engine programming. So they were basically letting journalists review cars that weren't even emissions legal, and Ford only had 1-2 months to fix the problem and get the cars certified by the EPA before their on-sale date. That's a rather major problem to say the least.
Obviously, it would make much more sense to fix all the bugs well before a product launch, but time is money, especially in the corporate world. I'm not making excuses for Canon, but I doubt they're the only company out there that operates like this. Users have reported many teething issues affecting the D800 on the Nikon forums. None of them are major, but they seem far more annoying to be than a silly light leak that everyone is complaining about.
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