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I knwo that Amazon needs to cut costs, but close a website with THIRTEEN people on staff? Jeff Bezos have a bigger crew just to clean his balls.

They won't close. It's a big asset and will have a lot of buyers. Current staff might go over to the new non-Amazon site or they will leave and do something else, which for me would be a good thing as they're not really up to the job. DPR has a ton of camera info that would be very sad to lose from the internet, the database of specs, and historic reviews are part of the camera world's culture and it would be vandalism of the highest order if some idiot decided to delete it all rather than keep it online. It costs almost nothing to keep a website online and I am surprised Amazon is making such deep cuts at all, as DPReview is hardly likely to be a huge loss making part of the company. What are the REAL reasons the site is closing? It surely can't be due to money. Perhaps a big fall out at the top between the DPReview management and Amazon? If Amazon really are looking to save a few thousand dollars running DPReview which drives a ton of traffic to Amazon for camera purchases, then how bad must it be at Amazon?! They were hiring like crazy during covid, big profit boom, then suddenly they can't afford to run a camera blog? Even I can afford to run a fucking camera blog. I smell something fishy. Either the news is fake and they already have a buyer lined up. Chris and Jordan seemed really chirpy in their jokey closing video. Or they are all hired already by a new site and will simply rebrand the existing one. There is simply no way they will delete it. The SEO and Google links alone are worth redirecting to a new site domain. Why bin it? They're not telling the truth.

Indeed. No real explanation, it's all very fishy. Watch them bounce back in a week miraculously the site is saved and is going to continue under the ownership of Smugmug as Canon's in-house magazine!

They've already announced the site itself will remain available for a few months before being deleted. Just a shame.

Wow! I guess site founder Phil Askey got out at the right time. His Insta profile describes him as "now travelling and eating around the world". Here's a recent interview with him. https://www.dpreview.com/interviews/5323285840/phil-askey-founders-interview The comments towards the end are a little ironic now "Amazon are giving the site everything it needs to continue to be the leading voice for everything photography related." ...until they pull the plug! The forums will be gone. I still have esoteric questions that a dpreview thread will answer. Are FB groups where it's at nowadays? They suck because they're insular, hard to read, and search. I imagine in the future, when these words are also gone, I'll be telling my kids "once upon a time there were internet boards and forums".

Keep in mind that the S5II has wildly different color than the S1 and S5, which both looked identical. Also the S5II has some image-processing related flaws which still need to be fixed. I'll hear from a person who is close to engineers soon hopefully wether this issue will be solved or not. If not I would highly recommend looking out for the R6II or even Pocket 6K or just staying with the S1 if video quality is important to you. Skip any Sony (unless you can afford the A1 or FX6) or Fuji cameras. The banding artefacts are quite obvious in darker areas on the S5II, so in case you intend to do some lowkey style shooting you will run into problems. Some examples: https://www.cined.com/panasonic-lumix-s5-ii-lab-test-rolling-shutter-dynamic-range-and-latitude/ (latitude tests) Also seen here, red and green banding, similar to GH4 back in the days, both 10 bit 422 and external ProRes.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Why can't current cameras do 14 bit 4k raw? The 5d MK3 featured a processor capable of 14 bit RAW at 3.5k, that was 11 years ago. I guess color depth isn't marketable? Although 10 bit seemed to be and still seems to be a huge selling point. All these years later and no cameras have this feature outside of cinema cameras which have been doing this since 2010. To me that is what is missing in the lower end cameras. I have been tempted to get an old 5d MK3 and run magic lantern on it as a B-cam to my Alexa. Obviously there is a dynamic range difference but the color information is there. The workflow and ergonomics simply aren't good enough for me to use the camera on professional projects.

Amazon told them in January, some left the very next week and got a new job. During these last 3 months, it appears absolutely nobody in charge has made an effort to save the site or kick up a fuss, let alone sell what is a very valuable asset for certain other companies. It's ridiculous that Amazon isn't considering a sale. Jeff must be a bigger loser than even I imagine him to be. Although not quite as big an idiot as that guy who wasted $44bn on Twitter, the likes of which can't seem to find even .00001% of that amount to preserve 25 years of photographic gear culture.

Perhaps at one time, when they bought it, the site might have had some relevance in bringing sales to Amazon. It was still the glorious period of forums and blogs. But now all the traffic comes from influencers and fu@@ing youtubers with affiliate schemes. It's much cheaper and that's how it all runs now. The shameful thing is that the site is really part of the global internet culture and it doesn't make sense to shut it down in a month. They probably already have a buyer. At least I hope so. Chris and Jordan can do the same anywhere and with anyone but the mountain of info accumulated over the years on the site has enormous cultural value.

That was quick!

I suspect a new site will open, but I do have to wonder if all the content will be carried over. It will be a damn shame if it isn't, and there will be only one party to blame for that: Amazon. I think Chris and Jordan are probably in a more advantageous position than most of the DPReview staff. Most of the stuff they tested came from The Camera Store anyway, so I doubt little will change for them in that regard when they start their own channel. Plus I imagine they'd probably be welcomed back to The Camera Store in general.

Honestly I'm shocked. No real explanation either which seems like a giant slap in the face of their community.

It just seems awfully abrupt. Not even a months notice and they're shutting down.

If you think that those running DPReview had that much control to do any of those things without Amazon's approval you don't understand how corporations work. That isn't to absolve the people at DPReview of all responsibility, but when you sell your company to a corporation you cease to have that kind of control.

But Amazon have almost infinity storage. They could keep the site open as an archive. (but probably they won´t because will remember everyone that they killed it)

I know everyone wasn't a fan, but one less camera media outlet is not good. Such are the risks when you sell your site to a larger company that only cares about the bottom line, I guess. Not good news for the community as a whole, and really unfortunate for all those who are losing their jobs.

I kept thinking that Panasonic is missing a golden opportunity here to put a LX100 III in the market.

Do not underestimate the legacy of Canon..R7 is just a pleasant camera to use and the best tool at the money (new).

It has the worst tonality and color separation of any camera I've tried over the past 4 years. To be fair I never tried the X-T4 and 3, which are considered even worse in that regard. To add the image is also heavily oversharpened in comparison to even Sony cameras. Also the Long-Gop codecs have heavy 1-sec interval flickering and the All-I codecs are impossible to edit on M2 Max machines even, which means you basically have to shoot ProRes. No issues with external BRAW though, all the color information is definitely there from the sensor. The internal image processing is just awful but once bypassed you'll get a nice image. With ProRes RAW the image is even better. Dynamic range with the 12 bit readout for external RAW is pretty much identical to the 14 bit readout, you won't get more than 12 stops either way. Only advantage over other cameras is that the X-H2s still has is its fast readout.

Yeah this is a shootout that I want to see, I do miss my 5D III. If I can find one for a bargain I might pick it up and compare it to the S5 II. The micro jitter of the 5D III is something that I do not miss though, but locked off it might be interesting.

IX-H2s seems to have very little rolling shutter in Flog1 (Something between 5 and 6 ms) while it has 11-12 ms in Flog2. As i am also looking for a camera with little shutter, this seems quite interesting...

The 5D III doesn't pixel bin in Magic Lantern 3.5K RAW It is a S35 crop of the sensor (1:1 readout) with no binning or line-skipping. And yes, it's bloody amazing.

28mm should be decent on the 6k sensor. You go super wide and you really start to lose a lot of depth, but its scene/location dependent obviously. My suggestion would be to add as much weight as you can. If you can get the rig close to 5 pounds it will make your movement so much nicer. An Easyrig for me doesn't really help to stabilize. Just saves your arms a bit for longer takes. If anything sometimes the easyrig makes stuff less stable, when people let the camera get away from their center of gravity.

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

Maybe they figured they would prefer people to read reviews on amazon.com instead of dpreview.com