18 ms·

Dang, I'm actually surprisingly sad about this. DPReview is _the_ site for extremely detailed analysis of cameras. When I want to buy something I go through the

by ragona 4y ago

Dang, I'm actually surprisingly sad about this. DPReview is _the_ site for extremely detailed analysis of cameras. When I want to buy something I go through their report first, and it's always extremely informative. It feels like this kind of layoff is part of an end of an era. Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. I once had to get approval from my VP's VP because we wanted to turn off a product with eleven daily users. 11. The number after ten. A whole lot more than eleven people used DPReview, and they provided a service that I'm not sure is well replicated from other sources. A loss for the internet, and it makes me sad that these kinds of quasi-public-good projects are getting canned across the industry. I get that big companies are not retirement homes for nerds but... with as much profit as the profit centers bring in, there was a little wiggle room for passion projects. Now it feels like that wiggle room is being squeezed right out of the industry as we all brace for the recession that hasn't quite shown up yet.

fetus8 4y ago
You're spot on, this is _THE_SITE for extremely detailed analysis of of cameras/lenses/etc. I have no idea what will end up filling the gap of losing something like this. I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey and make the content they've been making, but man, there's still a need for a detailed text based site with super indepth info about modern camera equipment. Such a bummer.
- oktwtf 4y ago
  While I agree that there is some valuable content on the site, there are certainly others to fill in the spots... You want detailed look into equipment? Checkout Ken Rockwell's site[0], or byThom[1] [0]: https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm [1]: https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html
  - asdff 4y ago
    Sites like these are also dying breeds with their days numbered. Informationally dense, text and figure, lightweight websites are not being made anymore. Sites like dpreview or Ken Rockwell are pretty clearly holdovers from days long gone and sensibilities long abandoned. Today, all that information that could be read in 5 minutes on dpreview is drip fed to you in video form from a gesticulating talking head, over 25 minutes with an advertisement every 5, wasting both data and time to likely only end up partially informing you compared to a dpreview or Ken Rockwell article.
    - PaulHoule 4y ago
      I think of how video game walkthroughs have gone this way. It used to be you'd find exhaustive 300k text explanations of everything in a game. Now there is a "let's play" video that goes on for 40 hours, you have to find the right video to watch, then seek to the right place in that video, it's exhausting. The one case I found the video was better was in a certain level where the way forward was to make a jump that didn't look possible and the video made it obvious.
      - visarga 4y ago
        Try the GPTs they might know the game tricks and adapt to your specifics without search, of course if the info is prior to 2021.
        asdff 4y ago
        It's going to tell you exactly how to compose your pokemon team to beat a gym that doesn't exist in the game
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        My son made it all the way through one of the older games doing all the fighting with one Pokémon, developing others just to host skills like cut. I have been disappointed with recent fire Emblem titles because level trumps the weapons triangle.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    Fred Miranda was a useful set of reviews of lenses from their members. Now it’s mostly forums Which makes sense. Once you have the gear… https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/index.php https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/index.php I used dpreview in the past. They had detailed technical reviews, side by side test shot comaparisons. Really a first class site. They will be missed.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    DP Review's reviews have the benefit that they use the same methodology, so comparing one camera with another was easy. For example, I can do side by side comparisons of how much noise there is at ISO 1600.
  - Espressosaurus 4y ago
    Ken Rockwell is a blowhard that copy/pastes info into every "review". His sharpness comparisons are laughable, as is his blatant fanboyism (which went from Nikon to Canon. It's funny to read the things he said about one brand 10 years ago and compare it to what he says about the same brand today). I would not put him into the same category as DPReview with a straight face. DPReview gave us the exposure latitude and high ISO comparison tools, which are wonderful for teasing apart differences in cameras. For example, I know the Z9 is 1 stop worse in high ISO noise performance than the Z7 due to its electronic shutter because I can see it in the comparison. That makes it easy for me to set my max ISO appropriately. Their reviews weren't perfect (I prefer Photography Life's, especially for the lens reviews--but they do principally Nikon reviews), but they were damn good. Nobody does what DPReview did. This is a sad passing, but reflects the general decline in ILC photography unfortunately.
    - dboreham 4y ago
      I don't know him but I have to say I like Ken Rockwell's content. I wouldn't go to him for pixel peeping lens comparisons but for a general overview he's good. There are also nowadays several good YouTubers in this field. And of course there's TDP albeit Canon and Sony-only coverage there.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Espressosaurus 4y ago
        I liked him too when I started out and didn't know better. There are other people out there and I recommend learning from them. Especially composition, lighting, contrast, and colors. Take from Ken the advice to get out and shoot with whatever you have (it's good enough to shoot with if it was made in the last 15 years), ignore everything else he has to say.
      - roelschroeven 4y ago
        On his About page, Ken Rockwell says > To use words of Ansel Adams on page 193 of his autobiography, this site is my "aggressive personal opinion," and not a "logical presentation of fact." This website is a work of fiction, entirely the product of my own imagination and personal opinion. and > I have a big sense of humor, and do this site to entertain you (and myself), as well as to inform and to educate. I occasionally weave fiction and satire into my stories to keep them interesting. I love a good hoax. and > I have the energy and sense of humor of a three-year old, so remember, this is a personal website, and never presented as fact. I enjoy making things up for fun, as does The Onion, and I publish them here. (All of that are his own words!) If you enjoy his writing for entertainment, no problem. But don't take anything written there as fact.
  - dhbanes 4y ago
    Please do not recommend Ken Rockwell. Try Fred Miranda
  - adamredwoods 4y ago
    Those sites are a fraction of DPReview's content. In all seriousness, where is DPReview's content going? Forums of over 1,000,000 posts. Solid reviews of older cameras. All gone, hopefully to some archival site. It's really surprising to see that content just disappear. Reminds me I need to backup my hard drive...
- dhucerbin 4y ago
  There’s still https://www.lenstip.com/ https://www.lenstip.com/. English version of Polish site optyczne.pl. What’s funny, team from this site criticized dpreview for being not scientific enough.
- throw0101b 4y ago
  > I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey […] Joining PetaPixel in May: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6T3qWI2c-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6T3qWI2c-Y * https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-drake-join-petapixel-to-lead-its-youtube-channel/ https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-d... And their "The end of DPReview" video: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8 They'll planning a few 'closing videos' before things are completely shutdown.
- 75dvtwin 4y ago
  petapixel, flickr groups there is 500px (this is more image oriented) 100asa -- for more professional photographers, and photrio.com for the film camera, and film-development crowd. I do not like petapixel -- because they ask me to register with google or discuss not interested in any of those... I am surprised that dpreview was owned by Amazon. Never knew about this.
giobox 4y ago
I do think times have changed though, DPReviews fortunes arguably have mirrored the fortunes of the ILC (interchangeable lens camera) market. The site (along with flickr.com...) was a daily visit for me 15 years ago at the height of the DSLR boom, but I honestly now can't remember the last time I checked. ILC/DSLR annual sales volume peaked in ~2010 I believe, and has rapidly declined ever since really, another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones. If we are being blunt, Amazon bought dpreview to use as a sales funnel for DSLRs and cameras, which they simply don't sell so much of anymore. A sad day though. I know dpreview covers cameras beyond ILCs, but ILC reviews where always by far the most popular content on the site - in the DSLR boom/Phil Askey years it simply was the gold standard in DSLR reviews. I still remember pouring over the classic battle between Canon's 300D and Nikon's D70 for entry level 6mp DSLR supremacy constantly on dpreview circa 2003/4.
- asdff 4y ago
  The thing is, there's another boom currently going on. The mirrorless boom, and this site is the gold standard for that one as well. Now there is no home, and its much harder to gleam the differences that are actually meaningful between these many mirrorless cameras (and new dslrs that do get made).
  - bradlys 4y ago
    a "boom" is an overstatement. The camera industry overall is dying and struggling. We're down to something like 10% of camera sales from 2010. There is no boom. There is a transition from DSLR to mirrorless for the few existing dedicated camera photographers out there.
    - cozzyd 4y ago
      10% camera sales or 10% ILC sales? The point and click market is obviously irrelevant for a mirrorless boom.
      - klodolph 4y ago
Zak 4y ago
It's weird they plan to shut the site down instead of just leaving it up with its existing content. Paying writers and camera reviewers is expensive, but hosting the site isn't (when you're Amazon).
saurik 4y ago
> Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. FWIW, Amazon killed Amazon Flexible Payments in 2015. They ostensibly replaced it with Amazon Pay, but they didn't offer any kind of migration path for existing users/accounts (which felt very much like a Google thing to do) and, frankly, the services were fundamentally different: the former was more like a better version of PayPal, while the latter is more like a worse version of Stripe. I had a lot of contact with the team as this happened as I was their biggest user on mobile devices for years, and they begged me to move to their new product, but they were really screwing me by shutting down the old service in the way they did--deleting the account history and customer connections rather than just figuring out a new way to use them--and the new service not only comparatively sucked but was way more expensive (trying to command the Stripe premium, forcing me to rely solely on PayPal, which is much cheaper for small payments if you ask for their micropayments pricing). But like, Amazon Flexible Payments was amazing. They seriously had a pricing model that automatically scaled into separate buckets all the way down to tiny tiny tiny fractions of a single cent (on which they changed like 25% with no fixed component) when using your balance, while supporting all of the standard use cases for large ($12+) payments that Stripe is good at, having the API prowess of AWS attached to the flexibility of PayPal but using your Amazon.com account's payment information. But like, it had seemed as if they internally lost all the engineers working on that project and could no longer fix even basic things like their email template. It definitely soured the otherwise excellent long-term support experience I've had with Amazon services.
- ragona 4y ago
  Yeah I'm sure there are counter-examples. My experience is that I worked at Amazon from 2012-2020, and I recall trying to shut down a project in maybe 2013 and it was _incredibly_ tricky.
Clamchop 4y ago
They ran an online discounted fashion outlet called MyHabit some years ago. I used it often and I'm sure there were at least ten more like me. But they shuttered it.
twoWhlsGud 4y ago
Indeed. The interchangeable lens camera market has stabilized (on a revenue basis at least), but it seems unlikely to ever again be a fast growing consumer market. That said, we're talking about a pretty affluent community of users. Keeping the site up in some basic way would have been a relatively cheap way to keep generating the positive brand image the site generated in that community. I wasn't exactly overflowing with happy thoughts about Amazon before this move, but the sudden shutdown isn't helping. I suppose their exec staff is doing us a favor by reminding us all to support more regulation of behemoths like these...
- D13Fd 4y ago
  What regulation would have helped here? “No buying a website with the intent to develop it but then changing your mind”?
astrostl 4y ago
Sites like DigLloyd ($), PhillipReeve, FredMiranda, ReidReviews ($), and LensTip are still ticking and far more detailed in their analysis. Note the drift toward individuals and sometimes payments (which seem to be sufficiently-accepted). A ton of content has shifted toward YouTube as well.

by ragona 4y ago

fetus8 4y ago

You're spot on, this is _THE_SITE for extremely detailed analysis of of cameras/lenses/etc. I have no idea what will end up filling the gap of losing something like this. I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey and make the content they've been making, but man, there's still a need for a detailed text based site with super indepth info about modern camera equipment. Such a bummer.

oktwtf 4y ago
While I agree that there is some valuable content on the site, there are certainly others to fill in the spots... You want detailed look into equipment? Checkout Ken Rockwell's site[0], or byThom[1] [0]: https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm [1]: https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html
- asdff 4y ago
  Sites like these are also dying breeds with their days numbered. Informationally dense, text and figure, lightweight websites are not being made anymore. Sites like dpreview or Ken Rockwell are pretty clearly holdovers from days long gone and sensibilities long abandoned. Today, all that information that could be read in 5 minutes on dpreview is drip fed to you in video form from a gesticulating talking head, over 25 minutes with an advertisement every 5, wasting both data and time to likely only end up partially informing you compared to a dpreview or Ken Rockwell article.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I think of how video game walkthroughs have gone this way. It used to be you'd find exhaustive 300k text explanations of everything in a game. Now there is a "let's play" video that goes on for 40 hours, you have to find the right video to watch, then seek to the right place in that video, it's exhausting. The one case I found the video was better was in a certain level where the way forward was to make a jump that didn't look possible and the video made it obvious.
    - visarga 4y ago
      Try the GPTs they might know the game tricks and adapt to your specifics without search, of course if the info is prior to 2021.
      - asdff 4y ago
        It's going to tell you exactly how to compose your pokemon team to beat a gym that doesn't exist in the game
        PaulHoule 4y ago
        My son made it all the way through one of the older games doing all the fighting with one Pokémon, developing others just to host skills like cut. I have been disappointed with recent fire Emblem titles because level trumps the weapons triangle.
- acomjean 4y ago
  Fred Miranda was a useful set of reviews of lenses from their members. Now it’s mostly forums Which makes sense. Once you have the gear… https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/index.php https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/index.php I used dpreview in the past. They had detailed technical reviews, side by side test shot comaparisons. Really a first class site. They will be missed.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  DP Review's reviews have the benefit that they use the same methodology, so comparing one camera with another was easy. For example, I can do side by side comparisons of how much noise there is at ISO 1600.
- Espressosaurus 4y ago
  Ken Rockwell is a blowhard that copy/pastes info into every "review". His sharpness comparisons are laughable, as is his blatant fanboyism (which went from Nikon to Canon. It's funny to read the things he said about one brand 10 years ago and compare it to what he says about the same brand today). I would not put him into the same category as DPReview with a straight face. DPReview gave us the exposure latitude and high ISO comparison tools, which are wonderful for teasing apart differences in cameras. For example, I know the Z9 is 1 stop worse in high ISO noise performance than the Z7 due to its electronic shutter because I can see it in the comparison. That makes it easy for me to set my max ISO appropriately. Their reviews weren't perfect (I prefer Photography Life's, especially for the lens reviews--but they do principally Nikon reviews), but they were damn good. Nobody does what DPReview did. This is a sad passing, but reflects the general decline in ILC photography unfortunately.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    I don't know him but I have to say I like Ken Rockwell's content. I wouldn't go to him for pixel peeping lens comparisons but for a general overview he's good. There are also nowadays several good YouTubers in this field. And of course there's TDP albeit Canon and Sony-only coverage there.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      I liked him too when I started out and didn't know better. There are other people out there and I recommend learning from them. Especially composition, lighting, contrast, and colors. Take from Ken the advice to get out and shoot with whatever you have (it's good enough to shoot with if it was made in the last 15 years), ignore everything else he has to say.
    - roelschroeven 4y ago
      On his About page, Ken Rockwell says > To use words of Ansel Adams on page 193 of his autobiography, this site is my "aggressive personal opinion," and not a "logical presentation of fact." This website is a work of fiction, entirely the product of my own imagination and personal opinion. and > I have a big sense of humor, and do this site to entertain you (and myself), as well as to inform and to educate. I occasionally weave fiction and satire into my stories to keep them interesting. I love a good hoax. and > I have the energy and sense of humor of a three-year old, so remember, this is a personal website, and never presented as fact. I enjoy making things up for fun, as does The Onion, and I publish them here. (All of that are his own words!) If you enjoy his writing for entertainment, no problem. But don't take anything written there as fact.
- dhbanes 4y ago
  Please do not recommend Ken Rockwell. Try Fred Miranda
- adamredwoods 4y ago
  Those sites are a fraction of DPReview's content. In all seriousness, where is DPReview's content going? Forums of over 1,000,000 posts. Solid reviews of older cameras. All gone, hopefully to some archival site. It's really surprising to see that content just disappear. Reminds me I need to backup my hard drive...
dhucerbin 4y ago
There’s still https://www.lenstip.com/ https://www.lenstip.com/. English version of Polish site optyczne.pl. What’s funny, team from this site criticized dpreview for being not scientific enough.
throw0101b 4y ago
> I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey […] Joining PetaPixel in May: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6T3qWI2c-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6T3qWI2c-Y * https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-drake-join-petapixel-to-lead-its-youtube-channel/ https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-d... And their "The end of DPReview" video: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8 They'll planning a few 'closing videos' before things are completely shutdown.
75dvtwin 4y ago
petapixel, flickr groups there is 500px (this is more image oriented) 100asa -- for more professional photographers, and photrio.com for the film camera, and film-development crowd. I do not like petapixel -- because they ask me to register with google or discuss not interested in any of those... I am surprised that dpreview was owned by Amazon. Never knew about this.

giobox 4y ago

I do think times have changed though, DPReviews fortunes arguably have mirrored the fortunes of the ILC (interchangeable lens camera) market. The site (along with flickr.com...) was a daily visit for me 15 years ago at the height of the DSLR boom, but I honestly now can't remember the last time I checked. ILC/DSLR annual sales volume peaked in ~2010 I believe, and has rapidly declined ever since really, another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones. If we are being blunt, Amazon bought dpreview to use as a sales funnel for DSLRs and cameras, which they simply don't sell so much of anymore. A sad day though. I know dpreview covers cameras beyond ILCs, but ILC reviews where always by far the most popular content on the site - in the DSLR boom/Phil Askey years it simply was the gold standard in DSLR reviews. I still remember pouring over the classic battle between Canon's 300D and Nikon's D70 for entry level 6mp DSLR supremacy constantly on dpreview circa 2003/4.

asdff 4y ago
The thing is, there's another boom currently going on. The mirrorless boom, and this site is the gold standard for that one as well. Now there is no home, and its much harder to gleam the differences that are actually meaningful between these many mirrorless cameras (and new dslrs that do get made).
- bradlys 4y ago
  a "boom" is an overstatement. The camera industry overall is dying and struggling. We're down to something like 10% of camera sales from 2010. There is no boom. There is a transition from DSLR to mirrorless for the few existing dedicated camera photographers out there.
  - cozzyd 4y ago
    10% camera sales or 10% ILC sales? The point and click market is obviously irrelevant for a mirrorless boom.
    - klodolph 4y ago

Zak 4y ago

It's weird they plan to shut the site down instead of just leaving it up with its existing content. Paying writers and camera reviewers is expensive, but hosting the site isn't (when you're Amazon).

saurik 4y ago

> Amazon used to NEVER cancel projects that customers were using. They just straight up Did. Not. Do. It. FWIW, Amazon killed Amazon Flexible Payments in 2015. They ostensibly replaced it with Amazon Pay, but they didn't offer any kind of migration path for existing users/accounts (which felt very much like a Google thing to do) and, frankly, the services were fundamentally different: the former was more like a better version of PayPal, while the latter is more like a worse version of Stripe. I had a lot of contact with the team as this happened as I was their biggest user on mobile devices for years, and they begged me to move to their new product, but they were really screwing me by shutting down the old service in the way they did--deleting the account history and customer connections rather than just figuring out a new way to use them--and the new service not only comparatively sucked but was way more expensive (trying to command the Stripe premium, forcing me to rely solely on PayPal, which is much cheaper for small payments if you ask for their micropayments pricing). But like, Amazon Flexible Payments was amazing. They seriously had a pricing model that automatically scaled into separate buckets all the way down to tiny tiny tiny fractions of a single cent (on which they changed like 25% with no fixed component) when using your balance, while supporting all of the standard use cases for large ($12+) payments that Stripe is good at, having the API prowess of AWS attached to the flexibility of PayPal but using your Amazon.com account's payment information. But like, it had seemed as if they internally lost all the engineers working on that project and could no longer fix even basic things like their email template. It definitely soured the otherwise excellent long-term support experience I've had with Amazon services.

ragona 4y ago
Yeah I'm sure there are counter-examples. My experience is that I worked at Amazon from 2012-2020, and I recall trying to shut down a project in maybe 2013 and it was _incredibly_ tricky.

Clamchop 4y ago

They ran an online discounted fashion outlet called MyHabit some years ago. I used it often and I'm sure there were at least ten more like me. But they shuttered it.

twoWhlsGud 4y ago

Indeed. The interchangeable lens camera market has stabilized (on a revenue basis at least), but it seems unlikely to ever again be a fast growing consumer market. That said, we're talking about a pretty affluent community of users. Keeping the site up in some basic way would have been a relatively cheap way to keep generating the positive brand image the site generated in that community. I wasn't exactly overflowing with happy thoughts about Amazon before this move, but the sudden shutdown isn't helping. I suppose their exec staff is doing us a favor by reminding us all to support more regulation of behemoths like these...

D13Fd 4y ago
What regulation would have helped here? “No buying a website with the intent to develop it but then changing your mind”?

astrostl 4y ago

Sites like DigLloyd ($), PhillipReeve, FredMiranda, ReidReviews ($), and LensTip are still ticking and far more detailed in their analysis. Note the drift toward individuals and sometimes payments (which seem to be sufficiently-accepted). A ton of content has shifted toward YouTube as well.