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As DPReview celebrates its nineteenth anniversary, I’d like to wish each and every one of our visitors a very Merry Christmas (something I couldn’t have said last year, apparently) from all of us here in sunny Seattle, and to thank DPR’s amazing staff and contributors for all their hard work over the last twelve months.
In many ways 2017 has been another challenging year for the photo industry, with sales of cameras and lenses still sluggish and flagship phones from Apple and Samsung proving that if you put enough clever tricks in the image processing pipeline it’s possible to overcome many of the disadvantages inherent in such small sensors and to offer photo quality in a phone that is more than good enough for most casual users.
Of course, as Sony has shown recently with its Alpha and RX cameras, there’s still plenty of room for innovation in the traditional camera market, and – as I say pretty much every year – there’s never been a better time to be an enthusiast photographer. There may be fewer cameras launched every year, but anyone shopping for a new body, lens or premium compact is spoilt for choice, and there’s been an explosion of creativity in the accessory market, in part fueled by crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, giving us even more opportunities to feed our photography obsession.
DPReview had a very busy 2017 – we published over 2300 articles (the highest ever, and almost 70% higher than 2016), including 75+ product reviews, more than 100 standalone sample galleries, dozens of videos and a small number of our ever-popular ‘sponsored articles’ to help pay the bills.
All change
Meanwhile, our engineers were beavering away behind the scenes on new features you’ll see appearing on the site in 2018, and in early autumn we moved offices (just down the road, but moving is surprisingly disruptive when it involves disassembling and reassembling a studio and a custom testing lab).
Speaking of moving, after more than 13 years at DPReview.com (and over 20 years reviewing cameras), I decided in September that it was time for a new challenge. I stood down as DPReview’s Editor-in-Chief and General Manager on October 1st, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to take up a new role in Amazon’s hardware development organization (Lab126), working on future Amazon devices.
Yes indeed, for those of you who made it this far down the page, this year’s Christmas message is my last. I feel incredibly lucky to have been part of the story of DPReview and, in a broader sense, to have had such an amazing vantage point from which to watch and report on the biggest revolution in photography since the Box Brownie. I’m proud of the work I’ve done here, and of the part I’ve played in the evolution of the site from a simple news and reviews site with a slightly crazy forum into the DPReview.com we have today.
Along the way I’ve had the opportunity to work with some incredibly talented people, made some great friends and travelled the world shooting with pretty much every digital camera ever made. Since my first content was published here (the Canon S1 IS and HP Photosmart R707 reviews) in early 2004 I’ve personally produced about 115 reviews and thousands of news stories and articles, overseen almost 18,000 published pieces of content and taken just over 300,000 photos.
Special thanks must go to my good friend Phil Askey – not only for bringing me onto DPReview in the first place, but also for the most enjoyable and rewarding few years of work of my life, back when it was essentially just the two of us running one of the biggest websites in the world in the middle of the biggest boom in the camera industry in a generation.
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| Phil and Simon, always working hard. |
Thanks also to all the staff, past and present, who have made DPR such a vibrant and authoritative source of information and inspiration, and to the numerous vendor representatives who have put up with me for all these years with constant patience and good grace. But most of all I want to thank you, the readers, because without you there’s literally no point to any of this. You are the purpose of this site, and the reason our standards have remained so high. I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all of you for your support and feedback over the years.
I’m confident I’m leaving DPReview in safe hands, both editorially and on the business side (watch out next week for more information on that), and I’m excited to see what the next generation of DPReview leadership brings to this resilient little corner of the internet in 2018 and beyond. All I can say is that I’m not going away entirely – I’m staying on as an associate editor (for as long as they’ll allow me), and I intend to still write occasional reviews and articles. But for now, all that’s left for me to say is so long (and thanks for all the fish).
SJ
Simon Joinson, former Editor-in-Chief and General Manager, DPReview.com
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)