The world can’t have nice things. I was shocked to find this email in my inbox yesterday.

At first I thought it was a phishing attempt. I punched up DPReview.com in my browser, and sure enough…

Yep, it’s really real. Due to Amazon’s attempts to please its unpleasable shareholders, DPReview.com will cease operations on April 10th. To say this is a great loss for the photographic community is an understatement. Phil Askey started the site in 1998, back when we still used AOL Instant Messenger on the regular. DPR would soon grow to one of the largest resources for digital imaging on the internet. Combine the staff writer’s work in reviews and test suites along with community posts in the forums and you’ve got the largest library of digital photography info on the planet.

Of course I was there; it won’t be hard to root out my many posts in the Konica Minolta and Sony Alpha forums. And while I was there I participated in the usual ragging on the site’s foibles. The “Highly Recommended,” the “Canon/Nikon/Sony” bias depending on what your system was, and so on. But such is the nature of posting on a forum, where user versus user sometimes brings out weird arguments.

But none of the old pissing contests matter anymore, because Amazon’s pulled the plug. They bought the site from founder Phil Askey in 2007, presumably to use it as an advertising engine. To their credit, they largely left it alone; the only Amazon influence I’d seen was affiliate links here and there. Amidst the flamewars and other noise were genuinely helpful contributors who helped each other out with settings, style, and critique.

To say that shuttering this site would be a huge loss for the photographic community is an understatement. The employees will be fine; Chris and Jordan have already joined PetaPixel and I’m sure the other staff writers will land on their feet. But it’s an indictment of our current society that it’s more profitable for a corporation to destroy something than to find it a new home. Don’t get me started on David Zaslav and HBO Max.

Every digital camera I own was purchased after a thorough research process. In the early aughts it was DPReview, Steve’s Digicams, Imaging Resource, and maybe a few more I’ve forgotten. The years have whittled them down, but Imaging Resource is still around, which is the Nikon to DPReview’s Canon. Whether it was my lowly Kodak EasyShare DX3600 or my current Sony A99II, the folks at DPReview made sure I knew the pros and cons.

My hope is that somehow someone can buy it off Amazon (unlikely) or that the site’s content is archived in some fashion. Forums come and go, and I’ve lost a few over the years. It’s the nature of the web. But DPReview is large enough that having an archive for historical purposes is pretty important. The early years of consumer digital imaging were a whirlwind, and where else could you track every movement, every rumor, every piece of news but DPReview?

As for Amazon, well, they’re making billions of dollars. DPReview is literally a rounding error to them, and Bezos is the Don Draper to DPR’s Mike Ginsberg. But there are people who do care, and they won’t forget.