  We compare the two main techniques used for estimating the state of a
physical system from unknown measurements: standard detector tomography and
data-pattern tomography. Adopting linear inversion as a fair benchmark, we show
that the difference between these two protocols can be traced back to the
nonexistence of the reverse-order law for pseudoinverses. We capitalize on this
fact to identify regimes where the data-pattern approach outperforms the
standard one and vice versa. We corroborate these conclusions with numerical
simulations of relevant examples of quantum state tomography.
