A GUY ATTACKS JAMES LILEKS ON METAFILTER, and discovers that he’s brought the proverbial knife to a gunfight. Or maybe a toothpick. Ouch.

Lileks is also dissing Sony products. I dunno. I’ve got a Sony VCR that’s neither the best nor the worst. (The best I ever owned was an RCA — really a Thomson, made in France, no less — that I bought in 1986 and that worked flawlessly until a few months ago). I have a Sony camcorder that’s not a patch on either the big Canon that the InstaWife used for her film, or my not-quite-so-big Canon that I use for various video projects of mine — but it’s been reliable, and it has a lot of nice features that the Canons lack. (My Canon GL2, by the way, actually produces better video, and especially more accurate color, than the XL1S — I thought that was just me, but apparently most people have found that to be the case.) And I like my Sony DVD player a lot better than the JVC one — among other things, if you stop a DVD it remembers the location and will automatically restart from that point, which is a nice feature. And the quality seems excellent, though if you follow that link to the Amazon page you’ll see that not everyone agrees.

I wonder, though, if Lileks isn’t noticing that Sony is getting worse mostly just because he’s bought a lot of Sony stuff. My impression is that consumer electronics in general are getting shoddier, and that the corner-cutting has gone a bit too far with a lot of them. You can read my Andy Rooney-like rantings on that subject here.