DPReview.com to close
dpreview.com
dpreview.com
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.
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.
Lenses appear to have declined by about 66% from 2012 to 2022. Cameras, by a little under 50%.
This decline makes sense to me. I have a Fuji XT4 which I like a lot, but, also, starting around the iPhone 13, phones got really good. Their automatic exposure in sunlight, for example, is often (not always) great. At the same time, the software quality in pretty much all cameras leaves much to be desired: I can go on a rant about the number of clicks necessary to wirelessly transfer from camera to phone but would rather not, and people have been ranting about that topic for at least a decade.
What phones can do is replace dedicated cameras for the basic photography needs of many consumers. Point and shoot cameras have gone by the wayside. So have many cheaper consumer-oriented interchangeable-lens models. Many people bought APS-C DSLRs and just used them with the kit lens. That market has fizzled out. For one, most of those people now just use their phones. But even if they don't use their phones, DSLRs from the early 2010s still produce good images by today's standards.
But you know what a smartphone can't replace? My 135mm f/1.8 lens, just to name one. And full-frame sensors are way better than phone sensors. I'd much rather use my Canon 5Diii (from 2012) than my Pixel 6 Pro.
More than that, I feel that in their question to get bigger and bigger sensors, phone cameras have missed the mark with their actual purpose. The Pixel 6 Pro, for instance, has a larger sensor size to get a shallower depth of field. But this is NOT a welcome change when I am photographing pieces of paper and get the wrong focus in my images. The fact that you can't stop down the aperture on the lenses in 99% of phones is a major limitation. And that's just the beginning.
Now, I'm not saying I never use the camera on my Pixel. But I am saying that it's not at all useful for anything I'd use a real camera for.
That's overly broad. A lot of what photographers do doesn't need those capabilities (hell, some photographers work with literal children's toys), and the niches where you need them are getting smaller all the time. There are a few things you still can't photograph well with a phone (e.g. birds in flight), but that's a long way from being all photography.
> The fact that you can't stop down the aperture on the lenses in 99% of phones is a major limitation.
My last two phones have been able to do this, FWIW.
-exasperated sigh-
I wish I could agree but I just can't. I feel around that point pictures taken by phone cameras stopped looking real. They started forcing stuff like HDR and AI correction and very heavy handed noise filtering.
Looking back at my old pictures from the 2010s, I think my canon digital elph took better pictures than my phones do now lol. I realize how stupid that sounds.
IMO the real problem is that there aren’t much connection between that photos you like and people. “If we take the S.D. Card out of the proper camera and insert it into a proper Computer…” just don’t cut it anymore.
They only have a phone each. You have to be able to get the photo to the phone to social media before the flash unit finishes recharging(on fresh batteries of course). Else they’ll lose interest.
ILC cameras also got really good.
I'm not at all doubting that smartphones are the primary cannibalization vector, but even for people who prefer to use cameras with significantly larger sensors than can be put into a smartphone I think the cameras themselves reached a point years ago where it became difficult even for ILC enthusiasts to justify upgrades on a regular basis because what people already owned was "Good Enough". I reached this point with the Sony A7R Mk3 and other people probably reached this point sooner.
For years it felt like Canon and Nikon were kind of aware this would happen with ILCs and were dragging their feet on camera body tech making incremental upgrades behind where the technology should have been if they were competing full speed, and then other vendors like Sony just came smashing in without being part of this implicit agreement and pushed camera body tech along extremely quickly for a few years (with Canon/Nikon having to follow along to some degree to keep up) and it didn't take many iterations of this pushing the technology to where it could be for ILC camera bodies to be something you feel no itch to upgrade from year to year because the shiny new thing is an extremely marginal upgrade.
So the cannibalization of the market probably had two fronts, the larger one from smartphones, and a smaller but still significant one from "Good Enough" (which is an issue smartphones are starting to run into as well).
Yeah this is a huge unaddressed issue that must be hemorrhaging users out of cameras. It’ll need a substantial rework in cameras and perhaps phones too, but I’ve seen enough times that the display of LCD taken and uploaded on social media and they must know that’s being done.
They could make a phone-camera hybrid, with or without in-camera Lightroom, TransferJet, USB cable transfer, anything in those direction that were attempted low-effort and forgotten.
People aren’t going to appreciate current hours-long delayed gratification that current ILCs require. No way.
Phone cameras will always look worse than their contemporary full size counterparts just due to physics, so the pros and prosumers will always be in demand of a dedicated rig even if their iphone looks like a spider on the back. Not to mention even today just from an OS standpoint, no phone has feature parity with even the first dslr released since phone manufacturers "childproof" camera features that pro camera manufacturers assume you don't need your hand held to use. Usually you have to resort to a third party app if you want to set a manual exposure, you know, something any photographer since 1860 could do that we now deem to be "too advanced" for modern humans.
On the other hand, mirrorless is starting to show growth[2].
Looking at the overall camera-sales are misleading, especially considering that it largely shuffled numbers around within big companies: A Samsung point-and-shoot with a Samsung sensor became a Samsung smartphone with a Samsung sensor, selling even more units with the camera still being a primary selling point.
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[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4242091-why-nikon-and-canon...
[2]: https://petapixel.com/2023/02/15/2022-was-officially-the-yea... (using CIPA data)
No GPS. The cheapest Android phone from 5 years ago has this. I don't want to use the shitty app to get geoinformation. Yes, battery lifetime - no need to enable it by default.
No embedded storage. With SSD prices cheap as now, add some 64 or 128GB storage. Keep the card slot.
More computational stuff, no need for enabling it by default, but stuff like taking 10 pictures, then selecting the best one automatically (or whatever the camera thinks is best). Additional: enable better tethering. On my Nikon Z7 I still can't set everything from the computer. Some settings depend on the mode (P,A,S,M) - why? Nobody knows.
If no flash, at least have some light.
For example there is no boom of home audio systems anymore, but there are enough audiophiles to support a number of sites and magazines
And while there are gloves which allows to use touchscreen using it in the snow is not the best experience either - pressing a physical button is easier.
I expect many smartphones to have quality better then this camera but in some conditions it's hard/impossible to use a smartphone. And quality is enough to capture some moments from a family vocation.
For all their improvements, smartphones are still extremely limited by sensor size and the size of optics. Those are terrible, compared to even the entry level DSLRs.
I'm glad it works for your use case (although I can't imagine what that is), but any decent photographer will be able to tell a smartphone picture from a picture taken with good optics and a DSLR. It's just that the market for those photos has also shrunk and the masses are happy with their instagram filter drivel.
Only you can judge what is "everything I want", but that's a surprising statement.
Phone cameras can't come close to the quality of even a full frame DSLR, anything medium or large format is light years ahead of phone quality.
So I can only think that quality wasn't what you needed/wanted, but then why would you have been shooting large format film?
It's not just the pace of improvement, but also the marketing spin. I find the strengths of smartphone camera and ILCs pretty complementary. Smartphone cameras work pretty well outdoors where there is enough light. DSLR and mirroless are hard to beat indoors in low light conditions. Coincidentally it is also easier to find your ILC indoors at home when you need it, rather than lugging it around on a hike. When we didn't have kids, we used to spend more time outdoors and so most of our memorable pictures are from a phone. Now that we have restless young kids and are spending more time indoors, almost all of the memorable photos are from a mirrorless camera. But the marketing spin makes it seem like ILCs are completely redundant.
I find the opposite. Proper cameras are much more flexible and plain better when there's enough light. Inside, without a flash, you'll not get a great photo anyway, so might as well benefit from “computational” fakery.
Only available on a traditional camera.
But even fewer people will bother with all that.
To put it in another way, ILCs were bought because saw people had to buy them, back in the day. If you wanted anything that wasn’t potato-quality, you needed an ILC.
A lot of photography was enjoyed as an accessible art. It was about being able to capture things. You don’t strictly need an ILC for that, and I think photography will evolve and adapt in that regard. There will still be a market for folks who e.g. need aperture or shutter control, simply because of market segmentation reasons. As an art-art, photography will be about being able to see things differently, and for that reason, there will be people drawn back to the knobs, switches, and lenses that ILCs offer. Some folks will say it’s about the bokeh, or the low-light, or whatever, but it was always about being able to see differently than what other cameras could see, or even what the human eye can “see.”
To which end, the marketing spin is just that. We shouldn’t discount creative folks being able to see differently with a smartphone. It’s just that there are shots that you won’t get be able to take with a small-aperture fixed lens on a smartphone sensor.
(This, and of course, applications where the bleeding edge of image quality matters.)
I don't think we're all that far away from having some sort of always on camera that cuts us as directors out of the "picture" entirely.
Eventually, your phone equivalent will tell you and your friends where to stand, what to do and what to say to get the most out of the location, people and activities you have at your disposal. You won't have any choice (unless you are in that small group that is effectively allowed to self direct your own videos for Tikstagram) if you want to be competitive at projecting a successful image.
Great for the folks shoveling content around, but maybe not what you want if you are trying to develop an individual vision.
That said for a quick snap where I'm just trying to document something my iPhone is awfully handy ; )
I beat the crap out of my Canon Rebel T3i, I literally wore out the shutter after about 150k pulls on it, and replaced it with a Sony A7 III with a "G" lens, and while the pandemic was a large reason for it collecting dust, I am going on a "big" trip to a scenic place for the first time since prepandemic in a few months, and I am not sure its going to find a place in my bag. For the space and weight, my P6 Pro does a fantastic job.
The overlap in quality is enough that I see myself rarely using an ILC in the future, and the A7 III is likely the last one I will own unless they make some leaps forward to compete with smartphones.
There is, in my opinion, no question that the 80D takes sharper pictures in daylight. It's just hard to beat a sensor that's that much bigger. The lenses, also, just have way, way more light gathering power.
Now, in dark places, at night, I used the P6P more, and that worked better than the 80D. But I'm glad I had the 80D for the big landscape shots and for the tight shots of people's faces.
The A7 III is way lighter and smaller than the 80D, and takes way better pictures. I would suggest considering finding a space for it in your bag. At least take a few pictures with both the P6P and the A7 III and view them at 100% to see if you're happy with the results.
I was sightseeing in the night and had my Nikon D7100 (crop sensor) with a good lens (up to f/1.8 iirc) and Samsung Galaxy S8+. After the first few shots, I put the dslr back to my backpack, the photos from the phone were much better. And that’s a pretty old smartphone!
I know newer Sonys have crazy ISO, also own a fullframe, but it’s just so easy to mess some setting up and end up with crappy photo from a dslr in those challenging conditions, and I’m no beginner when it comes to dslrs.
That's exactly the area where smartphones have been killing DSLR and mirroless for years now.
That's because of internal DSP processing, combining multiple frames, machine learning AI, etc, but to the consumer it doesn't matter: they get a clearer, more stable picture than what comes out of the DSLR/mirroless and with way less effort.
This is often called HDR.
The issue with combining images together is that it works for static objects well, but if things move -- it does not. So low-noise digital sensors still seem to offer much better results.
And certainly, startup-time (or app selection time) + focusing speed, is simply unmatched by phones compared to DSLRs or mirrorless with phase focus detection
I do think that Denoising images with AI/ML will be common place even in open source Image processing tools like Rawtherapee.
So DLSRs having APS-C or full frame sensors with lower megapixel count will do well if images are post-processed (or in camera processed) wit these AI tools.
In fact, I was thinking that buying a used DSLR from 2012 circa for 150$ bucks -- will yield similar results as a 2K camera or a 1k smart phone.
Phones are easier to transport/carry. That's has been their reason to take over the lens+camera systems.
But I think camera makers can make photo gear fashionable again :-). I am working on some ideas in that area :-)
When there is light, the colors you see depend on how well you're adapted to its white point.
"I want to see a picture with me at the Grand Canyon with nobody else in the shot at sunset after storm has just passed with a rainbow in the background"
waits a few seconds, boom. post to social, get lots of envious comments about my cool vacation.
(note: I'm setting aside the current misguided one-click "make it better" AI features as a temporary aberration that the marketplace of consumer tastes will correct. There's already backlash emerging around over-enhanced AI images on social media.)
It's not something I'd use, I usually want as much creative control as possible over all the settings and RAW conversion. There are too many permutations of parameters that "correctly" capture the scene according to different aesthetic aims. The reviews of the version 2 seem to agree, that it's useful, but not for experienced photographers with their own creative vision. But how then would the inexperienced ever develop a personal vision, using this?
I can imagine buying a new Fujifilm body but not sure I can imagine getting a new Canon at least so long as my current one works.
I probably haven't been back since about 2014, though, when I upgraded to a Fuji XT mirrorless system, which I haven't even used in five or six years now....
The only think which improved on smartphones was the marketing. Cameras on smartphones are still crap. (see Samsung moon shots).
They just want to take a pretty photo, and look at a pretty photo.
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.
You want detailed look into equipment? Checkout Ken Rockwell's site[0], or byThom[1]
[0]: https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm [1]: https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html
Nobody does what DPReview did.
This is a sad passing, but reflects the general decline in ILC photography unfortunately.
There are also nowadays several good YouTubers in this field.
And of course there's TDP albeit Canon and Sony-only coverage there.
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.
I want you to be very wrong, but I guess you're sadly mostly correct.
Informationally dense, text and figure, lightweight websites is all I want, those are the only useful ones.
Now it’s mostly forums Which makes sense. Once you have the gear…
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.
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...
Try Fred Miranda
Joining PetaPixel in May:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6T3qWI2c-Y
* 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
They'll planning a few 'closing videos' before things are completely shutdown.
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.
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.
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...
But they shuttered it.
This does make you wonder if this was the only possible outcome for Amazon or whether they are just too indifferent/lazy to make an effort to sell this to somebody else. I bet there would have been interested parties that could have taken over. It's the kind of bean counter move where the effort of finding out the answer to that question was balanced against the potential benefits (millions?) and disregarded for some reason. I don't buy the notion that this was not salvageable. It's an institute and a great brand with a loyal following. That has got to be worth something.
From the sounds of it, not all is lost, the two people behind the youtube channel sound like they will just continue on their own. They grew the channel to 400K+ subscribers. So that's not nothing. I hope Amazon does the right thing with the content of dpreview.
I'm surprised they ever bought DP Review in the first place. As a purchase it makes no sense for a company like Amazon.
As for this faith being "in the stars" as so many suggest, note that until very recently they had open positions. And as far as I know, plans to rebuild the entire site. It wasn't exactly on its way out, rather it seems a casualty of the current economic panic in tech.
Even if this was meant to be, the ramp down is close to criminal. Extremely short notice, no interest in selling it to another party, no plan to keep it online long term, no archival. Nothing.
This part of the web which I hold dear to my heart is on its way out. Long form, quality content, deep community (most of the time). Not only have smartphones disrupted photography itself, it has also changed content consumption. From long form to short form. Quantity over quality. And community engagement is shallow.
Discovery is under pressure as Google, Facebook, the like starve the web. The rise of AI chat bots will nuke the remaining debris.
It's quite telling that the site's 2 main reviewers (which are great) can fairly effortlessly move on as they were clever enough to build a following on their Youtube channel. You see a similar effect when journalists build a following on Twitter, in a way they become independent of their employers.
It's just another sign that independence will wreck you. Google and social media are the traffic controllers of our digital existence. You play on their platforms or you cease to play at all.
At least, you'd be on a safe and stable platform? Well, no.
Imagine if Wikipedia were taken offline in 2048, with one month notice.
You're quite confident in the thing you just made up. The CEO of Amazon literally has written an announcement detailing the process where they comb through their various businesses and making cuts, where they openly state that these are due to suddenly worse economic conditions.
Super disappointed in Amazon for not at least keeping the 25 years of content online. If nothing else, recent reviews will be valuable for another 1 to 2 years and instructional content for at least 5 years. A bigger loss is that the overall site content documents much of the first 25 years of serious digital photography – an important and unique historical record due to the consistency of the editorial focus and review format. And Internet Archive is unlikely to capture it well due to so much CMS-based chart and hi-res RAW content in test reviews.
(BTW, I don't agree with those saying mobile photography/videography has (or will soon) make DSLR/mirrorless irrelevant. As useful & impressive as mobile imaging is, larger formats and interchangeable lenses still enable important capabilities for pros, semi-pros and serious hobbyists that mobile can't.)
I like to go backpacking. I used to always take my Full Frame Camera and a couple of lenses, after several years of going with the same crew, they finally convinced me that I should just leave the extra pounds behind and use my phone.
I won't do it again. The difference in the image quality, if you actually look at it, and not just scroll it, is night and day, and from my understanding of optics there is no way that it will ever be comparable.
In my personal opinion if you are trying to make photographic art, to really capture beauty, a smartphone camera is incredibly limiting. You can do it, just like you can make art with a disposable camera, however the rendering is too utilitarian and the ability to capture fine details will always be lacking. You can get moments quite well, perhaps even better than a ILC, I find "Live" photos particularly charming, and moments can be very beautiful. But again, my subjective opinion on aesthetics is that to capture things that are already very beautiful in their own right, like a landscape at sunset, a waterfall, or a Stag in the woods require fairly precise equipment–not algorithmic de-noising.
I am extremely sad about DPReview closing, it is an extremely valuable resource for comparing lenses. I will forever hold this against Amazon.
The iPhone photos (about 1 year old iPhone Pro) look fine, and are a great documentation of a lot of the interesting things I saw but which I didn't care to take pictures with the SLR (interesting things out the train window, shops and restaurants I went to, random things on the street, etc.). The SLR pictures are just something else though, and I had the eight or so best of them printed in large format to hang on the wall after I processed them, and I also show them to people on my iPad.
I guess the phone photos are all most people care to take, and that's fine. But I wouldn't just take a phone because I do want to actually make that art, and it really does make an incredible difference. I showed somebody some of the processed DLSR photos on the iPad and they were confused, thinking they were just iPhone photos I'd taken, saying "Why are these, like, good?". There's just something about a real lens and a full frame sensor that even non-photographers can immediately spot.
Having a third party archive and distribute such a large amount of copyrighted content also starts to get legally iffy. When the Bioware RPG forums shut down there was a lot of debate from the users on the best ways to save the content and distribute it in a legal fashion. There are movies and shows out there which were written off by the studios and are only available illegally. Honestly the official owner should take the initiative and ensure that future generations can enjoy the content - but of course they don't care and will just move on to other ventures.
So 10x-100x smaller than in photography’s hay day. (My guess is 1980-2000’s.)
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1690663587/amazonacquiresd...
Today, maybe it no longer makes sense from Amazon to hold onto dpreview. Maybe the source of truth for most people has moved on from high quality texual sources, to other sources. Perhaps these are youtubers who amazon supplies affiliate links instead in order to capture this market. It goes to show to never trust the hand that feeds you to look out for you, you can and will be cut once its deemed convenient and prudent, and the larger the company you hitch your wagon on the more likely are they to behave like a cold large company.
I wonder if that's the key point. It was Jeff's project, and like Alexa, is no longer protected now that he's no longer there.
Today people go to youtube first for reviews
I know that phone cameras have taken over the market in the last decade. For wide-angle lenses, they're great, but iPhones can't quite keep up (yet) with 200-300mm telephotos so I still browsed the site regularly.
I'm sure some YouTubers might pick up the slack but I hate still camera YouTube reviews because you can't download the files or check image quality for yourself (DPR has this studio scene where you could compare image quality at 100% side-by-side with different cameras at different ISO's).
- Blatantly ripping off products listed on their site, using sales data from those products as decision making on which products to steal.
- The monopolization of every market they enter
- Their search listings are garbage, amazon centric and filled with junk
- Anti-competitive practices such as pricing agreements for products on amazon, when listed on websites other than amazon
- They downright treat their employee's as serfs, nearly across the board.
- Amazon screws up and sends a poorly packaged product which is damaged? They just ship another one.
- Amazon starts creating "Amazon Basics" branded items? Either I buy it if it's a good price, or don't if it's not. Amazon Basics actually helps fight against the flood of cheap Chinese junk by creating a branded product of acceptable quality.
Stuff like anti-competitive practices or poor treatment of employees isn't even noticed by most consumers. This isn't like Walmart where both the customer experience and the corporate experience are equally poor.
Taking away existing products (like DPR) or slow shipment of items DOES visibly affect the average consumer.
I am sorry, what? Where do you think those cheap cables and whatever else they sell are from? Hand made by a grandma in rural Washington State?
I don't often intentionally look for cheap, low quality stuff to buy, but when I do, I'd buy an Amazon Basics item over a UEVYUF (or another <insert fake dropshipping brand here>) item every time.
I cannot imagine that cutting the maybe 30 people (tops) required to maintain the site and push content will make a difference in Amazon revenue; but removing this great online resource is sure to sadden thousands of users.
I saw this happen long time ago when a company I worked for decided to close a product division because it was the fifth most popular i the company. The people working on that product left, formed a startup, did the exact same thing and made $$$. Today the product category is a tens of billions industry.
If they got it ironed out before April 10th, they probably could put a link to it.
This does not reflect well on Amazon. This could be sold, spun out, archived, given back to the founders, or many other things. 20 days is not enough time to do anything worthwhile, though.
It's such a shame.
True, but many tech nerds (who make decisions about services like AWS) visited dpreview.
Right now, I won't use GCP or anything related to Google in business settings because of about a dozen similar decisions which impacted me. There's a finite budget of decisions like this which a company can make before people lose trust, and it impact business.
It has been slowly dying since AMZN purchase, and I wonder why they did in first place.. maybe were paying too much out to DPR in affiliate link income? lol.
The larger problem is long-form written word reviews are dead due to the ad monetization models favoring video content. So now we all need to sit through 40min YouTube videos of blathering.
It does also seem like yet another signal that FAANG is killing off all the weird "how does that make any money" side projects they've collected over the last 10-15 years.
I can see though how the reviews might not be a viable business. My RSS reader learned not to show me many reviews about that site because I have a Sony, could care less about what new lenses are out for Nikon and Canon, and since I have a pretty good set of lenses I'd even feel overwhelmed keeping up with developments in the Sony world.
Huge loss!
It would be great if someone took it back to its roots.
https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/5323285840/phil-askey-fo...
Will miss this site a lot :(
Some of you may not know that Amazon went through a phase of buying the #1 site in every space. DPReview is the one for cameras. There were others (eg IMDB). Amazon's strategy seemed to be to drive traffic to their site by buying these sites.
Digital camera sales fell off a cliff. I think they peaked at about 2010-12. Now we're at less than 10% of those sales, possibly less than 5%. Of course because of phones. I still like specialist cameras that do things phone can't (eg 300x zoom, 1000fps recording). But these are now niche products.
it seems strange to shutter the site however. How much upkeep does it really require? You can pause actual reviews so all you have to do is add new cameras when they're released, which isn't that often these days. You can even close the forums if you don't want to moderate them.
it's similar to the Google Reader argument: it simply can't be that expensive to maintain.
And it's not the first time that a niche-expertise site was killed by a conglomerate. I'm still pretty salty about Google strangling Zagat, to mention just one similar case.
Bigcorp operate like ant colonies, and run based on what's best for them. It's literally the defining aspect that separates small business from big business. In the former, people are in control. In the latter, the business is in control.
This is an exceptional portal with second-to-none depth of photo technology coverage.
It feels like something is missing in "we're closing" message. Cost is not the problem these days.
Pending lawsuits?
Blackmail from deep pocket disgruntled vendor?
DPReview wasn't just about in-depth camera reviews which they pioneered and excelled at but also about the forums where photographers of all level of skills and interests would come together to share their passion and thoughts. This more than anything else would be a massive loss.
What's next? IMDB?
Wondering if anyone knows an alternative site for this...
https://archive.fart.website/archivebot/viewer/ http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveBot
But I guess it's not making any money for Amazon.
Do you know what kind of website would make money?
The buzzfeed style equipments websites. Those full of lists of top 10 best vlog/instagram cameras/tripods. Each item on the list starts with some affiliated links, beneath them are some bullets of pros cons, and every couple of graphs there is a google ads.
I feel exhausted reading them.
Please can anyone recommend alternatives?
Reading is a dying art. No time; everyone is too busy and the Internet is too vast. It's all about videos and twitter-sized text.
Have we really come to an era where so few people care about cameras and taking good pictures that it warrants a shutdown of _the_ camera review site?
Today, the environment is different. If you want to get an audience on your stuff today, you aren't going to make a dpreview or a kenrockwell.com, because when you look around you don't see that stuff very much. You see seoified crap articles, and information drip fed over 20 mins on youtube with advertising in between. Such is the game today and how it must be played if you are to receive any views at all and get that initial userbase.
- Thing becomes popular
- Megacorp takes notice and offers eye-popping amount of money to acquire thing (or doesn't have to because the founders are in over their heads anyway with how popular thing has become)
- Megacorp shuts down thing because it is a distraction from their other things which are printing unimaginable amounts of money
- Rinse and repeat
Consolidation of the entire internet into the hands of a few megacorps isn't just a problem because of their outsized influence.
> You can request a download of all the photos and text you’ve uploaded to the site. This will be available until April 6th, after which we will not be able to complete the request.
Would be nice if they'd organized to make sure content lived on at the Internet Archive?
It’s probably hard as digital cameras have been replaced quite a bit by phones. I used that sight for many point and shoot camera purchases. The reviews were good and it had a good summary of all the cameras that were out there.
There’s still the “Fred Miranda” board, but that’s more user lens reviews and a little dated. That site has shifted to focus on photos more than gear, which makes sense.
Other than generally Amazon doing layoffs my guess is interest in equipment that they talk about has dropped greatly and specifically because of smartphone cameras (Iphone in particular in my case). I have an expensive Sony Camera (several thousand for the body with a $2000 lens and other lenses) and haven't used it in years. I just use the Iphone. And I am someone that had a darkroom years ago and really enjoyed photography (and made money selling pictures even). It was a big deal to me to take pictures. But it was more exclusive since most people didn't have a professional camera.
Photography has changed in the sense that back when I did and enjoyed it there weren't any digital aids or easy ways to make pictures look good. Or be able to just take as many pictures as you wanted in all sorts of light conditions. And that was actually part of the fun for me. I mean even my Sony camera can't fix pictures like the iphone can on the fly.
The iphone (I've had all of them now an iphone 14 pro max is what I use) is just good enough to provide enjoyment.
There was a time where upgrading your digital camera constantly was necessary, because sensors at the time struggled in low light and you saw some really big gains for a while especially in the entry level. That said, even a 2005 5dmk1 is still a great camera today as elderly as it is compared to any other piece of consumer technology, and blowing up its 12 mega pixels into a huge print down the side of a building will probably still look a lot better than doing the same with a new phone with twice as many pixels. Having pro cameras last a long time of course hurts sites that favor a customer base that is constantly changing gear and checking in.
For me multi-lens phone cameras was the thing that really tilted things. I know initially I was infatuated with SLRs and DSLRs because of the big fancy lenses, especially the long ones out beyond 200mm.
But over time I realized the vast majority of my favorite photos were all getting taken with lenses < 100mm in focal length, and I simultaneously got bored with the whole "bokeh" stuff and narrow depth of field. That's what made it so hard to avoid using the phone more and more often.. a super wide, a moderate wide, and a short telephoto cover so much.
It can be hard to argue against a good smartphone + a small drone as a travel photography kit.
Also their market is now full of counterfeit and Chinese crap that you can buy cheaper on AliExpress.
BHPhotovideo is the place I do most of my electronics shopping these days.
If amazon tore down the wall, I could actually be sure I am ordering a true xiaomi product from them and I could probably get it closer to what it costs on aliexpress. Walmart has this same issue actually, somewhat worse because its easier returning things with amazon since they evidently don't care how or why you are returning things.
What I'm seeing is that the early adopters who got Prime early on are the first ones to quit.
Where do you live? I hear this repeated on HN a lot, but every person I know IRL doesn't have this problem (ie family spread across multiple states). Hell, in the last ~2 years, other than high-demand stuff in the pandemic like Clorox wipes, most of my orders have been _next_ day delivery, nevermind 5 days.
I'll happily pay a bit more for the ability to shop and learn and get product support.
I stopped using SLRs back in 2010 or so. Phone cameras weren't good enough to surpass them by then, but I knew that this is the direction that everyone was going and lugging around a camera while traveling was a pain.
Fast-forward to today, where you can get excellent photos and videos in almost all light conditions thanks to huge advances in computational photography and bigger lenses.
The only advantage that SLRs bring are interchangeable lenses. Not sure how strong that moat will hold up though.
So my point is it is still a pretty significant industry and it still deserves a review website. That is one of the unfortunate things of large companies buying niche sites like dpreview. They look at everything at the 10 000 feet level and kill the website even if demand for it still exists. I do hope the dpreview editors find a way to continue their work at a new site in the near future.
I'm a bit skeptical of that. Phones almost eliminated the market for the lower-end fixed-lens cameras that made up the majority of camera sales. People mostly bought those because they wanted to capture memories and share interesting things they saw with their friends and families. Phones do a fine job of that now, and are more convenient. Most of those customers never bought interchangeable lens cameras.
ILCs are for people who want to do photography in some sort of serious sense. Phones won't replace ILCs for that market any more than a multitool replaces a set of screwdrivers for a mechanic. The biggest thing stopping people from buying new ILCs is old ILCs.
I have a seven year old Olympus. If I spent $2200 on the new one, I'd get a bit faster burst rate and an autofocus system that's better at tracking certain subjects. If I switched to a different system in the same price range I'd get slower burst rates in most cases, but a bit better noise performance and dynamic range. I could sell my current camera body for about $500, making that a $1700 upgrade for... not a whole lot of improvement.
A guy named Ken Rockwell runs a solo operation publishing reviews of cameras and lenses across the DSLR / mirrorless ILC market.
https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/reviews.htm
Example review of the recently released Canon R7 (a nice mirrorless camera I own):
https://kenrockwell.com/canon/eos-r/r7.htm
Note that his review style is to start with sample images, and then kick off his prose/text review. So you have to scroll a few pages until the "Introduction". That starts here:
Here's their review of the Canon R6 m2 for comparison (unfortunately they haven't done an in-depth review for the R7 so I can't provide an apples-to-apples comparison):
https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canon-eos-r6-mark-ii-in-dep...
DP Review also has a YouTube channel that is separate from their website reviews, and offers a more casual and entertaining format. He's their video review of the R7:
I expect that Jordan Drake and Chris Niccolls from the DP Review YouTube channel will also be starting a new channel.
The inflation apparently, does not just affect the currency value -- it also corrects the value of salaries compared to the outcome.
I am also expecting that 80% of the companies behind the 2,600 apps in this list: https://theresanaiforthat.com/ will close those efforts down within 2 years.
The next iteration of businesses/sites that come in place of dpreview -- will be ad-ridden, small budget enterprises like
emulsive.org
Just a couple of days ago, I noticed all their review videos on front page featured the same presenter, and it gave impression they're down to just a couple of people running the site.
https://petapixel.com/2023/03/21/chris-niccolls-and-jordan-d...
> The saddest part of the shutdown is Amazon’s decision to keep the site in “read-only mode for a limited period” after the shutdown on April 10th. That is a shame considering how valuable a resource has been for the internet from the beginning. It is even more disappointing because Amazon is the largest cloud provider in the world, and letting this live on wouldn’t even cost them a damn thing.
Obviously there's much more content than user data.. but i'm sure we can keep it alive too
I can proudly say I had an image selected as a winner in one of their annual "best photos of the year" contests.
So in that sense it's not surprising to see dpreview go away, as I am likely similar to many others in my changing habits. But I really hate that it's going offline. So much knowledge is captured in those forums -- not just specs and tech but technique and ideas. What a shame. Wish it was staying up but dormant.
I learned a lot reading the review, and trusted them a lot. I just recommended them to a sibling a week ago for a camera rental. These days I don't get emotional or attached to websites (or companies) but this one hits, and hard.
For me, the equivalent place to hang out, read reviews or discuss techniques were the forums of home-barista.com in the late 2010s. Lots of coffee innovations now commonplace came from there. I wasn't necessarily looking to buy an espresso machine or a grinder, but it felt like a place where people more knowledgeable than me in an interest of mine were pushing the boundaries, out in the open.
This is ridiculous for a company as rich and huge as amazon. Go shut down IMDB next so I won't buy any movies from you anymore either.
I'll miss their detailed analyses.
The economics of cameras have changed but I fear that the market for independent reviews has cratered and made it much more difficult get honest unbiased information.
I checked: I’ve been active on DPreview for 19 years.
I can't imagine this even registers anywhere on Amazon's financial statements, such lack of care for the commons to decide to just close this down (not that I'd except anything more really of that company).
"The site will remain active until April 10, and the editorial team is still working on reviews and looking forward to delivering some of our best-ever content. "
Are they taking it offline too?
just reading the petapixel article: it does :(
There may also be a bunch of coding to do, I don't know enough about ArchiveTeam to tell what needs doing, but its probably either URL enumeration or similar.
Also because of rate limits, the job will need a lot of IP addresses. These will be gotten by individual users running the Warrior. So if you have a suitable machine/network for that, please take a look:
Hopefully somebody builds an archive at least.
That site is a part of industry and digital photography history!
The incredible rise of the dSLR and digital compact cameras was astonishing. Then to have the industry smashed by the iPhone and Android is equally so.
If they're really gonna shut down, I'd better backup their site and maybe use an AI summarized version of their content for my site.
This is sad as we continue to see old, professional, decent online publishing decline.
It’s really sad.
However I don't really think it's much of a loss for photography. DPreview was always pushing the whole equipment acquisition as the goal part of photography that always seems so weird. They would regularly talk about how you needed some new camera and willfully ignore alteration to your technique that got better results without needing the new equipment. Their forums and comments were always ultra dramatic and controversial with all kinds of brand bashing & cheerleading and other stuff that had little to do with photography.
I think it was OK at first as all the tech was new, as time went on it became more and more counterproductive.
I actually think smartphones getting people off the train of ever fancier cameras every few years actually helped photography due to:
- Better UI
- don't need to relearn a new camera constantly
- Always have the phone, so everyone got more practice
- Forced use of prime lenses made more people start moving around to frame their photos
- People started to forget about the tool and just use it
I'm still holding a pretty high value amount of camera gear, probably higher value than any other hobby I have. But it doesn't get used as much, and I"m constantly thinking of selling it off. I guess a lot of that being a result of no longer really caring about the specific types of photos the expensive camera gear facilitates.
Not only will I not miss it, I'm glad it's going, I found the reviews to be extended advertising for camera manufacturers and retailers, and the forums were packed with know-nothings arguing over cameras they'd never used.