Quote - Ghonma I reject your "viral marketers" deprecation; that was unnecessary. but I still want to know how you arrived at your opinion about the gamma correction; what are you accustomed to that is no so limited?

I'm sorry but i don't know what else to call all the prattle being posted in the threads by people who should know better.

About gamma, you are (or were) interested in MAX aren't you, so why not try opening the tone mapping control from mentalray and seeing what proper gamma is supposed to look like. Here's a pic from XSI, which has an identical one:
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Note how you can not only control all sorts of things besides gamma, but that you can do it using photographic terms which is very important to get close to real world results. Similar tools can be found in most high end renderers, image editors and standalone apps. The gamma in PPro is mostly useless on it's own and was put in only to fluff up the feature list IMO.