Author Topic: DP Review shut down by Amazon  (Read 3601 times)

Snoogly

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DP Review shut down by Amazon
« on: March 21, 2023, 20:28:14 »
It’s a shame, and a bigger shame how Amazon is doing it. No indication that it will be left up as a read-only archive/resource.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close

More news about it in the usual places on the Interweb.
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Richard Hawking (not Richard Haw!), in Tokyo

Øivind Tøien

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2023, 21:24:42 »
While the site was known for a lot of "noise" and brand fighting in some of the fora, the information stored in more neutral and technically oriented fora will be a great loss. I learned a lot of my early astrophotography from the forum there, although lately I have been more geared towards the Cloudy Nights astro photography sections.

If you have any considerable information posted there, now is the time to go through your original threads and archive .pdf prints to preserve them!

I took a look at the site Wayback machine, and finding back to information does not look very feasible. DPreview offers to provide an archive of your posts and stored images (already signed up), but we will not know how useful and in what form that will be provided before it is too late to look for alternative archiving.
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Akira

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2023, 23:11:05 »
It’s a shame, and a bigger shame how Amazon is doing it. No indication that it will be left up as a read-only archive/resource.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/5901145460/dpreview-com-to-close

More news about it in the usual places on the Interweb.

Thank you for the note, Snoogly.  Although I've never really looked into the fora or registered for the site, I've enjoyed DPRTV and did have referred to their reviews.  Yes, it's a big loss.  There is no such a technically oriented review site in Japan.

That said, Chris & Jordan may continue to create their video contents in any possible way:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLikDUacsC8
"The eye is blind if the mind is absent." - Confucius

"Limitation is inspiration." - Akira

Snoogly

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2023, 00:25:01 »
I find the DP forums particularly useful. Especially as I recently got a couple of geriatric Fujifilm X mount cameras, and the Fuji forum is very active.
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Ilkka Nissilä

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2023, 11:54:31 »
I always felt that dpreview had too much of a focus on equipment and articles seemed to be written in order to promote the sales of new equipment rather than advancement of the reader's photographic skills. They did publish occasional articles on photography topics but not all that many.

I think the DPR user comments on articles and the equipment forums contained a lot of inappropriate comments and contentious debates where there was not a lot of consideration given by posters to other points of view. A lot of the fighting was very unpleasant to read and yet it was not moderated out. It would mean I would only rarely dare to peek into the forums, expecting a lot of insults and fights between the users of different brands or products to pop up. This isn't the way a good forum functions.

Although nikongear is quieter in terms of traffic, people tend to be more civil towards each other here. I like that. I hope now that dpreview is going down there would be more traffic here (and other cites which maintain civility of discussion). Although the forum name includes "Nikon" and "gear", many of the posters are accomplished in creating photographs and clearly are very interested in photography rather than only the details of equipment.

It is interesting that the two people who created the video reviews at dpreview (Chris and Jordan) are moving to Petapixel. I guess the videos created by Chris and Jordan can be loved or hated, as they seem to do a lot of lighthearted comedy in their presentation, but I appreciate them also talking about their impression on the handling of the products and obvious issues even of a major manufacturer's product are not left unmentioned. For example it became clear from their review of the R5c that the battery capacity was a real issue.

I read that dpreview had difficulty recruiting staff with the required skills to run their lab testing. I miss Rishi Sanyal's reviews and insights. He seemed to bring a lot of knowledge to their editorial articles. I remember when the D810 came out with its press-shutter-button-twice EFCS implementation, dpreview noted that EFCS helped with sharpness also in hand-held use (including lenses such as the 300 PF which had issues with certain shutter speeds) and that they hoped Nikon would make an implementation of EFCS that would be easier to use and I believe they said they discussed it with Nikon. In the D850, the EFCS is also available in Q and Qc modes where a single shutter button press resulted in slightly slower mirror actuation (to make it quieter but also to reduce the effects of vibration) and EFCS was available in these modes even in viewfinder photography, though fps rate was limited to 3 and timing of the shots in this mode had to be learned to get it right. The D6 improves this further by offering EFCS in Qc mode at up to 5 fps. I really took a lot of advantage of this feature. As far as I know, Canon still doesn't offer EFCS in viewfinder photography on their DSLRs (though they do in LV, and have for a very long time). On mirrorless, EFCS is usually the preferred mode of use and doesn't lead to increased delay in the beginning of the exposure (as the shutter is already open and there is no mirror to move).  Anyway this was just an example of identifying a technical issue that had real-world significance and working with the manufacturer to resolve the issue. Few gear test sites have that kind of clout.

Bill De Jager

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #5 on: March 22, 2023, 18:39:56 »
I always felt that dpreview had too much of a focus on equipment and articles seemed to be written in order to promote the sales of new equipment rather than advancement of the reader's photographic skills. They did publish occasional articles on photography topics but not all that many.

That was also my impression, but on the flip side they did very thorough camera reviews that seemed well grounded in comparing a given model to past models and to current competing models.  I found they would catch things that more casual reviewers would miss.  Most of us eventually get a new camera at some point (though perhaps less so going forward as sensor improvements have largely plateaued) and I found the thoroughness and impartiality of DPR's reviews was a real help in making those decisions.

In the future, with DPR gone, with Thom Hogan bound to scale back his Nikon commentary at some point, and with Lloyd Chambers reviews being a quality but expensive service, there are going to be fewer sources of detailed camera reviews that can be trusted to be reasonably thorough and impartial.

I didn't find their lens reviews as insightful or helpful.

I think the DPR user comments on articles and the equipment forums contained a lot of inappropriate comments and contentious debates where there was not a lot of consideration given by posters to other points of view. A lot of the fighting was very unpleasant to read and yet it was not moderated out. It would mean I would only rarely dare to peek into the forums, expecting a lot of insults and fights between the users of different brands or products to pop up. This isn't the way a good forum functions.

I shied away from participating there for many, many years for that reason, finally starting up only a few years ago.  During my time there I did notice that they finally seemed to be cracking down on some behavior of this sort in at least a few fora.  Most of the commentary is fairly useless but there have been some nuggets of value along the way.  You really have to read comments there with a skeptical eye.

Øivind Tøien

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #6 on: March 24, 2023, 10:21:19 »
Some news here, not sure if that includes archiving/trannfering the old site (would be most interesting) or just restarting the fora. I am citing the text as the link will go away when DPR shuts down:
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4705915#forum-post-66962353
Quote
bobn2 • Forum Pro • Posts: 71,896
***News on DPRevived.com***

Following the thread on a possible successor to DPReview discussed in this thread:
https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/4705507
Here is the news.
Three proposals have merged efforts.
The new site will be DPRevived.com, not as originally advertised PhotoForums.com.
There is an interim site https://cameradiscussion.createmybb4.com/index.php hosted by Alansh. This can be used for ongoing discussions. Registrations and posts will be migrated to the long-term site.
ComeHither has created a registration page for the new site. This will be available on DPRevived.com when the name servers sort themselves out. During that the email management@DPREvived.com won't be reachable, so pleas have patience.
I'll post again when it's back.
Also, we've been in toch with Soencer and Nasim at Photography Life. They are also proposing a solution, hopefully that will be included under a single banner.
This looks like it might work.

Edit: It looks like it is just an attempt to start another forum without archiving plans, so not that interesting at this point.
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pluton

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #7 on: March 30, 2023, 06:25:02 »
DPReview was, at one time, well-stocked with teenagers---or adults with teenage brains---and there was a lot of stupidity.
Lately I have gotten a nostalgic feeling when I Google search something and the results include a DPR thread with posts I made in it 10 or 15 years ago.
Keith B., Santa Monica, CA, USA

Snoogly

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #8 on: April 01, 2023, 22:32:34 »
Some news, at least, about the camera and lens info/review database:

https://youtu.be/f9MG9XVVvCc
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Richard Hawking (not Richard Haw!), in Tokyo

Øivind Tøien

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #9 on: April 02, 2023, 05:21:52 »

To save others from spending time on the whole video, here is the link to https://digicamfinder.com/ that allows searching the web archive for specific DPR camera reviews. However the image comparison tools are not working at this time and other images are only working on the first two pages of the D500 review that I checked out. So it could look like the archiving does not go very deep or is not complete yet.
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ColinM

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #10 on: April 02, 2023, 13:10:29 »
Thanks Oivind.

Guess its been done in a rush but this place is a little unintuitive.

Hidden in grey text on the D500 page was a link to what looks like original DP review pages on this archive site
https://web.archive.org/web/20160716120110/http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d500/12

Øivind Tøien

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #11 on: April 02, 2023, 22:27:59 »

Yes, that was what I was referring to, but beyond page 2 of that and other reviews I checked the archival is incomplete, with just text an no images.
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ColinM

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #12 on: April 03, 2023, 18:03:39 »
Yes, that was what I was referring to, but beyond page 2 of that and other reviews I checked the archival is incomplete, with just text an no images.

Not quite; the link above takes you to page 12.
I was able to read every page of this review and they contained images as well as words

Øivind Tøien

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #13 on: April 03, 2023, 21:41:01 »
It has improved, more images are showing, but the image quality comparison images (studio scenes) do not show up for me. One could hope that what we are seeing is progress in archiving. Also, there might be a high load on the servers now. everything is very slow.
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ColinM

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Re: DP Review shut down by Amazon
« Reply #14 on: April 09, 2023, 09:25:39 »
Whilst we consider our own way forward here on NG,
some clarification over at DPReview

"Dear readers,

We’ve received a lot of questions about what's next for the site. We hear your concerns about losing the content that has been carefully curated over the years, and want to assure you that the content will remain available as an archive.

We’ve also heard that you need more time to access the site, so we’re going to keep publishing some more stories while we work on archiving.

Thank you to this community and the support you’ve shown us over the years.

Scott Everett
General Manager - DPReview.com"