The methodology that Reporters without borders use is inaccurate, unscientific by any measure, and should be treated with the same derision you'd treat a highly partisan news channel.

When you rank Singapore (where the regional HQ of BBC, CNN, Reuters, etc and no journalists have been killed) lower than the Congo ( where 6 journalists have been killed in recent years) then everyone ought to laugh at you.

I'm not defending the govt. I'm defending my right as a Singaporean not to be dictated to by supremely confident, yet utterly incompetent Americans whose knowledge of my country amounts to having watched a couple of half baked YouTube videos.

What utter nonsense, "de facto dictatorship".

When we have had free and fair elections since independence?

When we have a thriving civil society (AWARE, TWC2, Oogachaga)?

When we have a civilian-governed military?

When you can go to any MPS and complain about the government's incompetency without fear of retribution?

When we are entering our third political leadership succession in peace, never having had a bullet fired in response?

Contrast that with Americans and their Jan 6th insurrection.

We should all be annoyed at fly over critics like OP.

Japan has been ruled by one party for a vast majority of its post war history. These political structures are common in Asia.

> no freedom of religion

Again, nonsense by people who have spend little to no time here.

>de facto dictatorship

Nonsense.

Hmm..... I distinctly remember a George H.W. and a George W.

This is such a terribly written article for a content farm style website.

Apart from the hilarious sub-heading errors, i.e. "What James Camera is saying?", "What is Submersible Lenses", this writer doesn't bother (or hasn't had the experience) to communicate what is novel about this rig. In fact, it looks like he's a content farmer, who pulled out a podcast interview that Pawel Achtel did with Brett Stanley and just vomited the points out on text.

It's a really annoying feature of modern day news theft.

Anyway, I'll boil the salient details down for folks here, as well as a primer on 3D filming:

1. 3D films need to mimic the vision we get from both eyes. However, you cannot achieve the right distance between two eyes (the interocular distance) by putting two cameras side by side, because the cameras are so big.
2. To solve that, 3D films have long used a mirror rig/beam splitter: A mirror that allows cameras to be placed in an L shape, perpendicular each other, so that the right interocular distance can be achieved.
3. What is novel about Pawel's rig, is that rather than putting the whole L-shaped system into a waterproof housing, he made a custom water-infused housing for the lenses and the mirror rig. This allows for less image distortion.
4. He tested a whole bunch of 1980s Nikon lenses before selected two that were best matched in image quality.

That's about it.