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DPReview.com to close

dpreview.com

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Re: DPReview.com to close

#141

Post by foldr »

asdff wrote: post #133
foldr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily shoot RAW with manual control over exposure (and even focus) on an iPhone with Halide or other third party apps. Aperture is fixed, of course.

IMO if a third party app has to bring the feature its not really a part of the phone. Apps come and go. Plus apps like halide are paid so you could think of it as a tax to get to actually use some of the hardware you purchased.

That seems like a rather academic distinction. The cost of the app is minuscule compared to the cost of any of the camera hardware that you’re referring to.

The built in app does give you focus lock and manual exposure control (with auto ISO). Only a very small number of people would want the additional control that Halide offers, so it wouldn’t really make sense for Apple to add those features to the built in app.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#142

Post by enlyth »

RobotToaster wrote: post #138
giobox wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 victi…

I would've thought with everyone wanting to be youtubers camera sales would've picked up.

Faking the image quality through software is becoming more powerful than actually taking a good image, and people don't seem to care if the pixels on the screen are really what the optics saw.

They just want to take a pretty photo, and look at a pretty photo.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#143

Post by themagician »

sixQuarks wrote: post #44
The_Colonel wrote: post #40

Quite shocking, why not just sell it or cut staff. The site has to have significant monetary value.

They have an estimated 5.2 million unique visitors per month. It's definitely still a valuable publication, it's crazy they are shutting it down.

And it’s in a segment with high cost, high margin products. Site is worth millions in terms of ad revenue and/or affiliate income alone.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#144

Post by Espressosaurus »

oktwtf wrote: post #38
fetus8 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 [1]: https://bythom.com/reviews--books/index.html

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.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#145

Post by valarauko »

mihaaly wrote: post #121
valarauko wrote: post #114

Lots of people here saying they used to visit this site regularly. I'm curious as to what they got out of it (some people say they used to visit the site daily). I can see the value when you're looking to buy a camera, and reading reviews makes sense to me in that very narrow context. Besides that, why visit a camera review site daily? How frequently were people buying cameras? Professional photographers, sure, I can…

Daily is unrealistic - how many days of a year they have update for a particular interest? - but regularly when you are interested in cameras, following product news even if you are not buying right now, or soon, it is good. To be informed! I did so several years ago (once or more per week). Now... not so much. Less time for photography. If I had more time, this could have been different.

I mean, I kind of get it. Back when I was looking to buy a camera, I was on the site quite a bit.

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.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#146

Post by thih9 »

codersfocus wrote: post #139
codersfocus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that they're not going to sell the assets, and just shut everything down? If I had connections to an investment banker, I'd be trying to see if there's an in with Amazon...

It might be intentional then. Instead of having that content out there again where they will presumably have to pay affiliate commissions to the new owner, they must've calculated it's more profitable to just get rid of it.

In this case why not keep the old content online at least? And continue paying affiliate commissions to themselves?

Re: DPReview.com to close

#147

Post by saurik »

ragona wrote: post #3

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…

> 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.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#148

Post by hristov »

This is a little disappointing. Shipments of interchangeable lens cameras (the bread and butter of dpreview) have been going down since 2010 due to the increasing quality of cell phone cameras. However, at this point, both shipments of interchangeable lens cameras and lenses are stabilizing and growing slightly. And at about 6 million camera bodies and 10 million lenses per year these shipments are not insignificant. Especially considering that the average prices of these units are pretty hefty.

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.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#149

Post by Espressosaurus »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #108

Sad news. I've never bought a digital camera without first checking that website. Invaluable resource. I've been following their youtube channel as well for a few years as well and they just did an episode on this: : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8 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 some…

This was always the likely outcome given the decline in camera sales. They're not going to be making money hand over fist with hockey-stick growth, which is what it takes to justify your existence at a company like Amazon.

I'm surprised they ever bought DP Review in the first place. As a purchase it makes no sense for a company like Amazon.

Re: DPReview.com to close

#150

Post by nunez »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #99

I was just thinking about this site the other day. I was on a trip with an older DSLR Nikon D3200 and a Samsung S21 Ultra. Most of the time I had to look at metadata to tell which photos came from which, a fact that I found staggering. I thought back to how critical DP Review was 10–15 years ago and how much our phone cameras have closed that gap. Remarkable.

100%.

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.

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