Who we are, and how we are paid

PhotoVerdict compares mirrorless bodies and DSLRs, compacts, action cameras and camcorders, drones and gimbals, the zooms, primes and macro lenses that go in front of them, studio flash and continuous light, softboxes, backdrops and reflectors, tripods, heads, plates and cages, monitors and teleprompters, printers and film scanners — and the filters, hoods, straps, bags, cells and releases bought the week after — across 52 categories and five language editions. We are a small independent editorial operation, not a retailer, not a brand, and not a media group.

We write about making a picture and carrying the equipment that makes it, and only about that. Surveillance cameras and video doorbells belong to a sister site, and so do inspection and thermal cameras; projectors and their screens belong to another, and microphones and audio interfaces to a third. Memory cards are not our subject either — a body's card format is reported as a published characteristic of that body, and we never tell you which card to buy. Left out entirely: darkroom chemistry, which is a craft rather than a specification; broadcast and cinema equipment sold by quotation; and picture editing software. What remains is equipment chosen on figures a maker puts in writing and kept for years.

There is one habit a site like this has to keep above all the others, and it belongs at the top of the page rather than in a footnote. An equivalent focal length is arithmetic, not a measurement. The millimetres engraved on a barrel describe the optic and never change; what changes is how much of its projected circle a given sensor takes out of the middle. We publish the engraved figure with the format it sits in front of, we name an equivalence as a calculation whenever we use one, and we never print one in place of the other. The same restraint applies to a stabilisation figure quoted in stops, which is a laboratory result obtained under a protocol a maker either names or does not.

A figure reaches these pages by one route and no other: it is lifted from the maker that printed it, credited at the point it appears, and kept in the unit that maker chose. Three consequences follow us everywhere. A zoom quoted f/3.5-6.3 has two maximum apertures and we print both, because the second is the one that decides what the lens can still do as the light goes. A guide number and an energy in watt-seconds describe different quantities, so we never convert one into the other or set them side by side as though they ranked. And a maximum load on a tripod or a head is a static figure declared by its maker: it describes what the support holds without slipping, not how it behaves in wind or at the instant a shutter opens.

Who pays for this, and how

Each "Check price" button here is an affiliate link to Amazon, and a purchase made after following one earns us a commission. What the lens, the tripod or the packet of filters costs you is the same either way.

Knowing that an incentive exists is less useful than knowing which way it leans, so here is the shape of it. Amazon pays a share of the sale, which means a telephoto zoom is worth a great deal more to us than a lens cap. Three things work against that pull:

• What a thing pays has never moved it up a page. Commission plays no part in the order of any shelf on this site. Which reference pays best is not something we look up, and a family is sequenced by price tier and nothing else. Where the cheapest ball head in a family is the right answer, it stands at the top of it.
• Expensive and useful are not the same axis. Some of what gets recommended here most firmly is among the cheapest on the site — a hood that does more for contrast than any filter, a grey card that removes an afternoon of colour correction, a second cell for a cold morning. And moving a light closer to a subject changes a portrait more than replacing it does.
• No position on a page has ever been for sale. Nothing — no fee, no loaned equipment, no arrangement of any other kind — has ever bought one here. If that were ever to change, the page in question would carry the fact in its own body text, not in a line at the bottom of the site.

What we do not do

No page here is sponsored. No list here is a "top 10" stitched together from other people's reviews. And no order here follows what a reference earns, how briskly a link converts, or which model the warehouse happens to hold this week.

We also do not sell by specification. A large number makes effective copy and poor advice, and a page built around the biggest figure on the box tends to close by recommending the most expensive thing in the room. Every verdict here names what it rests on: the specifications, the manuals and the compatibility lists a maker publishes, the standards those figures are defined by, and the weight of what long-term owners consistently report. Where a judgement leans on one of those more than the others, the review says which.

Corrections

Prices move, bodies are replaced, lens ranges are renamed, and manufacturers quietly revise a coating, a motor or a firmware behaviour without changing the name on the barrel. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and say what changed. Every page carries the date it was last reviewed.