[ragona]

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.

[giobox]

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.

[vwoolf]

I'm seeing a lot of people discussing sales numbers; here is one article showing the decline in terms of both lens and interchangeable lens cameras shipped: https://bythom.com/newsviews/real-camera-economics.html.

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.

[asdff]

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).

[Zak]

Consumer fixed-lens cameras are much more dead as a market than ILCs, and those made up the bulk of camera sales. Almost everyone who isn't doing photography as a profession or serious hobby is satisfied with smartphone cameras now.

[vvrm]

> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones

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.

[pjc50]

Gloomy prediction: based on Samsung Moongate, the next logical step after the smartphone camera replacing the DSLR is AI replacing the smartphone camera. Or at least substituting for underlying camera quality. Take a 10MP image and have the AI fill in the detail. Or remove detail (see the google advert for editing people out of your holiday photos). Or put in some detail that wasn't there.

[ghaff]

I still use my Fujifilm XE-3 from time to time but use my Canon DSLR rarely--mostly for situations that benefit from very wide angle or telephoto lenses. And, yeah, if I'm going on a trip where I'm mostly only going to take some snaps, much less a local hike, I'll almost certainly just take my smartphone. And this is someone who still has a Flickr Pro subscription and used to spend many many hours in the darkroom.

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.

[visarga]

Hey there, been reading the same page around the same time. The 300D was the last DSLR I bought not because it was bad, but because it was so good. Even 15 years later phones could not compare.

[taude]

Yeup, I used to be a regular at dpreview a long time ago, certainly before I bought my first DSR the Canon 20d. But even before that when I was still buying point-and-shoots.

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....

[hulitu]

> another victim of the rapid pace of improvement in smartphones

The only think which improved on smartphones was the marketing. Cameras on smartphones are still crap. (see Samsung moon shots).

[novok]

What I don't get is why not spin off vs. just close?

[RobotToaster]

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

[Aeolun]

Not sure, I bought my camera from Amazon a few months ago as a result of dpreviews.

[fetus8]

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]

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

[throw0101b]

> I hope Chris and Jordan continue on their Youtube journey […]

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.

[dhucerbin]

There’s still 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.

[75dvtwin]

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.

[Zak]

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]

> 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]

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.

[twoWhlsGud]

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]

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

[astrostl]

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.

[Clamchop]

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.