On this day 1998: release of the camera that started it all

Photo: Richard Butler

The 26th anniversary of the Canon PowerShot Pro70 hitting the shelves heralds us nearing the end of our 25th anniversary year. It was the first camera founder Phil Askey reviewed, and that review’s publication, on December 25th, 1998, is the point we consider the start of DPReview.com

The Pro70 was a pretty high-end camera for its day. It was built around a Type 1/2 (~6.7×4.5mm) sensor and an impressively ambitious 28-70mm equiv F2.0-2.4 lens. It arrived some ten years before automatic distortion correction allowed wide-angle zooms to be squeezed into small bodies, so that 28mm-equiv starting point was a premium feature, and one that helps explain the camera’s size.

That wide, bright lens gives a hint at how high-end the Pro70 was. That and its $1500 MSRP marked it out as an enthusiast camera of its time. The next step up in quality from this was really the Kodak DCS SLRs, which costs multiple thousand dollars.

Because it dates from the very beginning of the site, I can’t speak with authority on what the Pro70 meant for the progress of cameras, in the way we’ve tried to in the rest of this series. But instead I can highlight the way the Pro70’s status as the first DPR camera has led to it popping up throughout the site’s history.

Throwback Thursday: Canon PowerShot Pro70 (2016)

The Pro70 is such a landmark camera for the site, we’ve had cause to look back on it before. I shot the old studio test in preparation for the site’s 10th anniversary, though we never ended up publishing the Pro70 vs Sony Mavica FD91 head-to-head we had planned. Technology had moved so fast in those first ten years that its lack of custom white balance, the choice of just two ISO settings (with a third available at 1/4 resolution), its tiny screen and agonizing shutter lag felt completely alien to someone who’d first really gone digital in about 2004.

The Canon PowerShot Pro70 isn’t as significant to the history of cameras as many of the other models we’ve covered in this series, but it’s popped up at key milestone’s in the site’s history. Photo: Richard Butler

It cropped up again at another key point in the website’s history: PIX 2015, the photo show we hosted at the Seattle Center in October 2015. As well as getting together a broad selection of speakers and brands to present to the in-person audience and over the web, we put together a booth showing what we did, giving attendees the chance to meet and talk to the team. Our booth included a range of significant cameras from the site’s history, including a Pro70, displayed in a custom perspex case.

I suspect it’s this same Pro70 that I planned to dig out as part of our 25th anniversary celebrations, only to find myself with a tighter deadline, when we were told the site was going to close in early 2023. I went ahead and shot our current studio scene, to show how far cameras had come during the site’s history and I still enjoy the symmetry of the lowest resolution and highest resolution cameras having pixel counts that differ by a factor of approximately 100.

Canon PowerShot Pro70 added to studio scene (2023)

In that same, strange period for DPReview, I went back and rebuilt the sample galleries of the earliest reviews, accidentally deleted some years earlier, so that it would be the most complete version of the site that got delivered to the Internet Archive. Which means it’s now possible to go back and see the Pro70 review as it was originally written, over twenty five years after it was first published.