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Et Tu?
26 March 2023
The closure of DPReview by its parent company, the apparently beleaguered Amazon, has sounded alarms in the digital photography community. Who's next if the Big Guy has fallen?
Exploded. A Panasonic Lumix XZ7 deconstructed, which is not how people buy cameras.
We don't come to praise DPReview but to bury it.
Just imagine, in May and forever forward, The Online Photographer, the Visual Science Lab, PhotoPXL and a number of other online sites (including this publication) will have more unique visitors and pages served than DPReview.
Even at the dawn of the digital photography age (which we were awake for), we didn't think basing a business on hardware specifications was sufficient.
We argued that you only bought a camera or scanner or printer only every few years at most. And you expected a good long life out of them when you did.
To get you coming back to an online publication, it wasn't going to be enough to scream, "New and improved!" with every press release.
PMA 2006. There were shows back then.
You were going to have to deliver what The Online Photographer, the Visual Science Lab, PhotoPXL and a number of other online sites (including this publication) deliver. Value.
And that value is what it means to take pictures. Why bother? What's a good one? How do make a good one great? How can you hold a moonbeam in your hand, Maria?
For those who relish specifications, sites like ours will continue to publish them. So will most online retailers, although only B&H seems to do a comprehensive job of that any more.
Behind the Scenes. Wayne Rogers keeping the Kodak book running in Orlando.
The days of test shots are probably over, though. And good riddance. They never reflected reality. They were instead designed to reflect controlled situations for legitimate comparisons. Comparisons that were ultimately meaningless, though.
We have often reminded ourselves that the photographers we admire historically worked with less competent equipment than your ordinary smartphone shooter enjoys today.
Autofocus? No. Color? No. Computational photography? Ha.
They made the most of what they had in hand. And we're still grateful for that. And, if we're smart (at all), still aspire to that.
O'Reilly Booth. Mikkel Aaland with Beth at the O'Reilly booth calling security when we walked by.
The future may not include DPReview but there's a future in digital photography. We're seeing that play out in machine learning as it intelligently informs algorithms based on artificial intelligence.
Adobe and DxO are leading the way in that direction. And sites that understand what they're doing and informing their readers about it will continue to attract readers.
The king is dead. Long live the king.