April Fools at DPReview – a look back

Revisiting past pranks

Happy April Fools’ Day, that day once a year where newsrooms like ours get to cosplay as The Onion. Normally today we would be gleefully monitoring comments and social media to see the effect of the ludicrous prank we pulled off this year. After all, April Fools’ and the Internet go together like butter and toast.

Indeed, this year we started hatching elaborate ideas months ago, plotting how to plant the seeds for a masterful con, but with the news of our closing it didn’t feel right anymore. To try to be pranksters as we enter our final, truncated month – the spirit was not there. Instead, we do what all people do when facing a loss: we started to reminisce and remember the good times.

The only thing that felt right right now was to take this day to revisit some of our past pranks.

The circular sensor that wasn’t there

When we look back at the annals of April Fools’ tomfoolery, there’s one trick that stands heads, shoulders, knees and toes above the rest. In 2010 we created a fake camera sensor company that said it planned to make circular sensors. Through an elaborate backstory, fake patents and a website we tried to make it as ‘real’ as possible.

‘The circular sensor brings you a host of new opportunities beyond the conventional boundaries of digital capture. No longer do you need to throw away half of the circular image seen by your lens, now you can use it all – getting more from your glass than ever before,’ the press release read.

The story walked the fine line between seeming plausible but not logical. It sparked some debate in our forums with some not noticing the date. We even managed to trick our good friends over at Steve’s Digicams, who took the press release and reported it as news. Good times.

The ultimate food photography camera

In 2017, DPReview’s Carey Rose was feeling rather spicy when he cooked up this tart of an idea. Samsung’s then new line of Family Hub 2.0 refrigerators featured a built-in camera that allowed users to see all the eggs, hot sauces and leftovers inside without having to open the door.

Rose gave the fridge’s camera the DPReview treatment, complete with a rundown of specs, in-studio testing and some in-field reflections (you’re gonna want to opt for the longest extension cord). We determined that the camera combined with the fridge’s LED lights had made basic food photography as easy as can be. ‘The camera fridge acts essentially as a large softbox or cove, with ample space to style your food with ease,’ wrote Rose at the time.

This prank actually started out in a serious place. We were thinking about where imaging is going and how cameras were starting to show up in doorbells, cars, robot vacuums and other unexpected places.

‘Also, Samsung’s exit from the consumer market was still relatively fresh in our minds,’ Rose recalls now about how the idea came about. ‘Other than phones and tablets, I think the fridge lineup was the only other product line of theirs that had anything imaging-related about it. Plus, let’s be real, a fridge might be one of the edgiest of edge cases where consumer imaging might even be considered relevant, so it seemed extra ridiculous to me.’

Readers seemed to pick up quickly that our review was a prank. If they didn’t right away, they certainly must have by the time we got to the field tests with wild bears.

As is the DPReview way, commenters also joined in on the fun. At one point someone pointed out that we did a poor job comparing it with actual competing models (apparently, LG also had a fridge with a camera in it at the time). Perhaps a round-up would have been appropriate the following year?

A pet cam reviewed

In 2018, DPReview’s Dale Baskin wrote a review of the Petzi Treat Cam, a pet camera with a built-in treat dispenser.

Baskin had actually gotten a few emails from companies that wanted us to review remote pet feeders with integrated cameras. ‘To this day, I have no idea how I got on that press list,’ he recalls, ‘But one morning a lightbulb went on over my head, and I thought, ‘Let’s review one of these as a real camera!’

Baskin contacted the folks at Petzi, who thought it was a fun idea and sent us the Petzi Treat Cam. We ran the camera through field tests, examined image quality through our studio scene and for good measure compared it to a Fujifilm GFX 50S, a 50MP medium format camera.

‘Because why not? The Petzi earned a positive ‘paws up’ rating,’ said Baskin. We gave the camera high marks for its easy setup and its large treat reservoir, and we were impressed by the Petzi social media network where pets could follow other pets. Less impressive was the camera resolution.

‘The article had a bit of a reverse April Fools’ effect. Some readers thought we had made up the Petzi for April Fools’ Day, and we had to explain that it was, in fact, a real product.’ said Baskin. ‘One reader even sent an angry (and, as far as I could tell, serious) email accusing me of selling out to ‘Big Pet.’

That would be the end of the story if not for a tiny screw-up. The review included a video I shot with Carey Rose that was supposed to illustrate how difficult it would be to replicate the Pezti’s treat dispensing functions using a regular camera. The video was only supposed to be seen by people who read the review.

But nothing ever goes perfectly, and we accidentally sent push notifications to tens of thousands of our YouTube subscribers who collectively said, WTF? Undoubtedly, it is the weirdest, most out-of-context video ever published on what would become DPReview TV.

‘We were still getting emails about that one weeks later from confused subscribers.’ said Baskin. ‘It still feels a little bit strange that, to this day, my review of the Petzi Treat Cam is often the #1 hit when searching for the product on Google, but I’d like to think it’s pretty good publicity.’

That time we accidentally invented mirrorless cameras, sorta

Leading up to April 1, 2008, DPReview’s Richard Butler asked a friend to post an image to our forums under the guise that they’d seen this camera in the wild and wanted to know what it was. (It perhaps went out to a Flickr group as well, our memory is a bit hazy.)

The camera did not exist. It was a composite created from photos of three other cameras, and we wondered how folks would respond.

‘A bit of a dud, this one,’ Butler recalls today about the prank. ‘We mocked-up the kind of camera we all thought we’d like, using the flip-up screen from a Sony DSLR, the lens of a Sigma DP1 and some of the styling of my 1970’s Olympus 35RC rangefinder.’

For the prank, we tried to make sure Butler was recognizable, along with London’s Tower Bridge (a frequent feature of our sample galleries at the time) in the background.

Three cameras were composited together to create this final image. Little did we know at the time that a rangefinder body type with a tilt screen wasn’t too far off from what modern mirrorless cameras would start to look like.

‘Unfortunately, no-one really bit. I suspect we over-estimated how recognizable we were and, in the days before rumor sites got going, there was no real way to build up any momentum behind it,’ said Butler. ‘Still, if nothing else, I think we got the “what sort of camera would people be interested in” aspect right.’

The mashup didn’t look anything like any cameras of the day, but looking back, it sure does look an awful lot like cameras to come, such as the FujiFilm X100V.

As for the ‘sorta’ in inventing mirrorless cameras, well…

Since both the Sigma and Olympus are fixed lens cameras, we can’t quite claim to have invented the mirrorless camera (this was five months before we first had need to use that term), but we did effectively prefigure the X100 by nearly two and a half years (except we thought a tilt-up screen would be useful, which would take Fujifilm another decade to implement).

So, ‘sorta.’

And now, one final prank…

… that’s not really a prank.

We know the March announcement of our closure was close enough to make some think (or hope) it was an early April Fools’ joke. Alas, it was all too true. So our final prank is really not a prank. We just wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for making DPReview an amazing community and for choosing to spend your day with us. Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or you just recently discovered us, we’re glad you came back.

Today we revisited only a few of our favorite April Fools’ Day pranks. Did we miss your favorites? Do you have any stories of having been fooled? Let us know in the comments.

Cheers.