Digital Photography Review Bought by Amazon

May 15th, 2007

I was surprised to read in Digital Photography Rreview that it had been bought by Amazon. I would assume this signals a major move by Amazon into the digital photography field, competing against that granddaddy of photography sales, B & H.

I purchased my Nikon D200 through Amazon, but getting it was somewhat a mistake. When these popular cameras were first out and impossible to find, I decided to put in a pre-order at Amazon while I thought about whether I could afford to buy the new camera. I figured it would be months before getting the camera, and I'd have time to get my finances in order. What I didn't know is that Amazon had a stash of these and next thing I know, I get an email that my order was filled. Whether I could afford it or not–I really couldn't–was moot.

In a couple of days, UPS delivers my camera: packed loose in a box, with one little air pillow to fill the large, empty space into which my camera was placed. Bounce, bounce. Bounce, bounce. Luckily, Nikon makes a sturdy camera.

Amazon has a ways to go before it can take on B & H. In the meantime, congratulations to Digital Photography Review. It will be interesting to see what comes from this purchase.

Comments
1
Sophie - 7:00 am 5/15/2007

I like to read independent reviews when I purchase a new camera, but a review website owned by a retail site loses much credibility in my opinion. Lots of 'review' websites tend to post not much more than slightly commented press reviews, so it's a shame to lose a site that did rather good reviews.

2
Doug - 12:27 pm 5/15/2007

It'll be interesting to see what happens to Digital Photography Review (not Preview). IMDb certainly has done well as an Amazon site, and to my surprise has not been "assimilated" even after almost a decade as an Amazon operation.

The question in my mind is whether Amazon can deal with what I see as a lack of quality reviews at DPReview of late. In the digicam segment, the manufacturers produce a hundred new models every year but DPReview can only review a handful of the more interesting ones, and the review process takes so long that the reviews are almost moot by the time that they're published. In the DSLR segment, the reviews seem to miss many of the important considerations for DSLR buyers… these buyers are not digicam shooters.

Also notably missing is any sort of guide to the top models in each category, and what the deciding points between them would be. Perhaps now they can afford to set that up.

The DPReview Forums are extremely active, and many of us who have posted there expect to be receiving "special offers" (aka spam) from Amazon shortly. DPReview requires a "real" e-mail address (as opposed to a webmail address) when subscribing to the forums, so there's a lot of interesting information there for Amazon to mine.

3
Shelley - 7:16 pm 5/15/2007

Doug, thanks for the correction.

I have to think the site can expand with the backing of Amazon, which might make reviews more up to date. However, I share your concern, Sophie: will this interfere with the objectivity of the site?

Thanks to all those who have contributed to the discussion. Comments are now closed, but you can contact the author of the post directly.

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