News / Site News

April 4th 2013: As you may have noticed, dpreview.com has been experiencing periodic outages in the past few hours, of varying duration. Issues have included site unavailability, slow page loading times, and temporary unavailability of our forums. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. We've been working hard to return everything to normal, but some of these issues may persist over the coming hours as we shuffle the zeros and ones back into line. As always, if you experience performance or functionality problems with any area of the site, we encourage you to send feedback via the link at the bottom of this page.

As part of our ongoing effort to make dpreview more useful, we've moved user reviews into the forum system. There are more than 40,000 user reviews on the site, and now you can create, post, view and comment on them directly from the forums. More after the jump...

US photographic trade body PMA and dpreview.com are conducting a survey looking for the views of dedicated amateur photographers. The survey asks about your photographic habits, the features you'd like to see in cameras and your use and experience of photo sharing sites and printing services. We're aiming to get a clearer understanding of what committed non-professional photographers want from their cameras and related services and your answers may even result in those things getting a bit better - including dpreview.com. Responses will be discussed at this year's 6Sight conference. As an incentive, one lucky respondent will be sent a shiny new Apple iPad with Retina Display.

We're delighted to be able to announce the introduction of mobile-optimized access to our forums. The mobile forums are one of the benefits that have been made possible by the new forums code we introduced in October 2012. This first release of the mobile forums supports the majority of full forum features, including both flat and threaded views - with the last-used format persisting when you next visit. We'll be building on the feature set in the coming months.

We've just deployed a smart new viewing system for images embedded in forum posts. It offers easy access to original images (100% view), makes navigating images easier within a post and lets you pixel-peep to your heart's content with the new loupe tool. We hope you like it - more information after the link.

The entire team at dpreview would like to wish all our readers Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings, Merry Christmas or whatever you say in your part of the world. As we celebrate our 14th anniversary we're thrilled what we've achieved in 2012 and are looking forward to another exciting year in 2013, with even more new features in the pipeline, even more of the high quality content that made this site what it is today, and some exciting new additions to the team. Whatever you're doing today, enjoy yourselves and thank you for being a part of dpreview.com!

Today sees the launch of connect.dpreview.com, a mobile, social and connected photography site from dpreview.com. Mobile photography and the ability to share images across social networks have helped foster a vibrant and creative new genre of photographic arts - one that is having a profound effect on the way we all shoot, share, discover and enjoy photography. Connect will explore, explain and embrace the social, mobile, app-tastic, connected side of contemporary photography. Click through for more details and a link to the new site. 

As part of the development of connect.dpreview.com we've created a more advanced, more detailed test scene, which will be launched on dpreview.com soon. The new scene is roughly eight times larger (in area) than the existing test, allowing us to test to even higher resolutions than before, amongst other improvements. Click through for more details.

We've just deployed the redesigned forum system - the biggest single change we've made since our forums were created, over 13 years ago. As discussed in an earlier news post, the new software will closely match the behavior of the existing system but with a range of additional features and with scope for further expansion in the future. We've sifted through the feedback from the preview announcement we made last week and have developed a list of requested features that we will start working on. Click here to find out more...

We're incredibly pleased to announce the imminent return of lens reviews to dpreview thanks to a joint venture with DXO Labs, involving the establishment of a dedicated DxO lens and camera testing facility in Seattle, and the incorporation of DxO test data into dpreview.com’s class-leading lens reviews. We're currently ironing out the last few bugs in the system, and hope to publish the first review later this week. More after the link...

In an ongoing effort to improve the performance and user experience on dpreview, we've completely redesigned the forums from the ground up, and will be launching the new version in the coming week. We want to create something you're happy with, so are looking for feedback, positive or critical, as we make the finishing touches. Click through for an overview of the new design.

What does the word connect mean to you? Share your vision with us through our photo contest: Enter for your chance to win a grand prize of $5,000! Read on for contest details. 

Eagle-eyed visitors will have already noticed we've made a few changes to the homepage and added a couple of new features (both of which are still very much at the beta stage). First (and most obvious) is the new menu bar, which we hope will make finding what you're looking for easier and more logical - and allows us the horizontal space we need for some exciting forthcoming features. We've also added a comprehensive selection of software to our database and introduced a completely new feature, the Link Database. More after the jump...

As a result of technical failures resulting from the storms that hit the eastern United States this weekend, some users may have experienced various problems with the site over the past 72 hours. Issues may have included slow page loading times, missing image thumbnails, dead links and temporary unavailability of our forums. We've been working hard to return everything to normal, but if these issues persist, or if you continue to experience performance or functionality problems with other areas of the site, please feel free to send feedback via the link at the bottom of this page.

Dpreview.com is seeking keen writers immersed in the mobile technology and photography world. As an external contributor to the world's leading digital photography website, you'll produce top-quality, well-researched, and innovative articles about smart phones, tablets, photography apps and photo sharing communities.

Are you an experienced writer with a passion for photography? Do you want to use your skills to contribute to the world's #1 photography website? If so, we want to hear from you. To expand on the reviews, previews and news stories that are the core of the site, we're looking for external contributors with a proven track record of producing top-quality content to deliver a diverse range of other articles. These include photographic technique tutorials, equipment buyers' guides, book reviews, and everything in between.

We've just launched a redesigned and improved on-site search feature. The search system, currently in beta, is designed to give more relevant results from all of dpreview's editorial and forums content. We've also redesigned the way results are presented, to make it easier to get to the information you wanted. We're looking for user feedback during the beta process to help fine-tune the system and how the results are provided, so there's a 'Feedback' link at the top of every results page, to let you report back to us.

We've made our product database available on the mobile version of the site. The addition of the products section (searchable by product name, browsable by brand and product type), is another step towards making the entire site available on-the-go. Our database currently includes cameras, lenses and printers and is probably the most comprehensive on the web. As before, there are small links at the bottom of every page to swap between the mobile and desktop versions.

We've just added a mobile version of dpreview, to make it easier to get to our content from your cellular, mobile or generally portable devices. In this first iteration we've made it easy browse reviews, news stories, articles and previews. Forums and commenting support will come in later versions. However, although we think m.dpreview will make it easier to enjoy the site, we've placed small links at the bottom of every page to swap between the mobile and desktop versions.

We're going to be hosting user avatars from now on - removing the need for you to use the Gravatar service. It means you can easily manage your avatar from within dpreview and that changes are reflected much faster. If you already had an avatar hosted on Gravatar, it will have been imported already so you don't need to do anything. However, if you wish to add or update an avatar, or you've changed yours in the past few days, we're prepared some instructions for how the process now works.