Forums formatting

An incremental update to the venerable dpreview forums, adding support for emphasis formatting (bold, underline, strikethrough, italics), lists, deeper quote nesting and a few other niceties. The new system allows easier extension in future and per-user customization.

If you do come across something a bit odd, let us know via the feedback system (remember to include URLs of broken messages)

Challenges

Our biggest development undertaking to date is the challenges project. This system will allow challenge creators to define series of challenges with a wide range of flexibility in terms of rules, submissions, voting and creation of follow-on challenges. Currently in beta we have limited functionality available however we will soon be opening the system to a select few challenge creators, if you're interested in taking part in this second phase of beta please use our feedback page.

Lens reviews

The heart of lens reviews was always going to be our systematic analysis methodology. This required us to design (and build, several) our own lens test chart, automated analysis software and presentation widget. Although we'll say it ourselves the widget is a triumph of visualisation of a fairly complex concept into something everyone can understand. Its interactivity means you can almost 'try before you buy' and even see crops from our original test shots.

Search

Although it may seem simple providing a full text search feature on a site the size of dpreview is no small undertaking. The index of 24 million items is updated daily and requires 30 GB of data to be shared among a farm of servers. This required significant infrastructure and code development.