Dick Lyon runs the photographic technology talks at Google. Day 6 concluded with the following response to the question "How do you understand reviews of consumer cameras given that all this magic is going on?":

I'm trying to arm you with some knowledge, so that when you read these things you can interpret them better, but it's hard. The guys that are doing the reviews don't typically understand all this stuff, and so they have their own mental models of what's going on and sometimes they say things that only make sense in their own imaginary world.

This problem does not exist only in the consumer camera world....