EDIT: In fact I'm going to copy & paste this portion right at the top here so people definitely see it:
I mean,
Canon flew reviewers to Hawaii to review the EOS R. Yes, Hawaii. The same place y'all are complaining about Sony sending reviewers to. The exact same place. Well, there is one difference:
the people Sony sent to Hawaii are not the same people who wrote this 3-way article, but the people who Canon sent to Hawaii are. Allison Johnson is who Sony took to Hawaii, and she did not write the article we're talking about here. Richard Butler is who Canon took to Hawaii, and he
is one of the two people who wrote this article.
In fact, not only did Canon pay for Richard to go to Hawaii to see the EOS R, but
they also got the whole DPReview video team over there, too. (It should be pointed out that for the a7III, Sony sent the DPR video team to... well, nowhere. They did their videos of that camera in Canada, where they live.)
Rest of original post continues below, with that section in context.
Gee, it's almost as if different people have different tastes, preferences, and requirements, isn't it?
If someone is trying to do wildlife photography and they find the AF on the 100-400 isn't keeping up, you don't say "well it's perfectly okay for my studio product work, so you must be wrong" or "useless hack, I bet B&H paid you to say that so they can sell more 500mm f/4s instead". You don't tell a jazz musician to play something a little simpler because you like pop music and therefore jazz shouldn't be played and all jazz musicians are secretly working to push Gibson guitars.
Some people don't care about the innards of a camera body as long as they end up with the shots they want with minimal fuss. Other people don't care about all the little capacitors and transistors but they do want to know how far they can push the camera in the field. Another bunch of people want to open up every camera and inspect every single piece of wire with a microscope and measure everything in minute detail.
DPR happen to belong to the latter category. That does not make them wrong, or that they miss the point, or that you and your interests are any more righteous. It just means that they are one group of people writing for one type of audience and you happen to not be that audience.
If a camera site is going into more detail than you're interested in and picking apart things you don't care about, that's fine. There's room for both of you. Read a different site and ignore the sites which don't cover the things you want.
The critical aspects, which apparently everyone here has just chosen to turn a blind eye to, are:
1)
Every company ships reviews off to swanky locations, special set-up test environments, gives them free demo units with fore immediate support than any regular customer would receive, etc. This is not exclusive to Sony. Canon do it, too. So do Nikon, Fuji, Olympus, you name it. It's so common, it's not even exclusive to luxury goods anymore. A friend of mine used to work for a video game website and she was flown out to Dubai to preview a video game which, at that point, wasn't even half complete. She ended up not even writing up the preview, but they still paid for her to fly back over a second time once the game was finished. And that's a common entertainment product which sold for about £45. Do you really think there is
any company in the world which
doesn't try to give previewers and reviewers the most impossibly perfect scenarios for adjudicating their premium products? If you can get a holiday to Dubai for a £45 game, you will get a holiday to look at a £2000 camera, too, and everything in-between.
I mean,
Canon flew reviewers to Hawaii to review the EOS R. Yes, Hawaii. The same place y'all are complaining about Sony sending reviewers to. The exact same place. Well, there is one difference:
the people Sony sent to Hawaii are not the same people who wrote this 3-way article, but the people who Canon sent to Hawaii are. Allison Johnson is who Sony took to Hawaii, and she did not write the article we're talking about here. Richard Butler is who Canon took to Hawaii, and he
is one of the two people who wrote this article.
In fact, not only did Canon pay for Richard to go to Hawaii to see the EOS R, but
they also got the whole DPReview video team over there, too. (It should be pointed out that for the a7III, Sony sent the DPR video team to... well, nowhere. They did their videos of that camera in Canada, where they live.)
So, you know. Y'all might want to actually pay attention to who has been sent where by who before you start throwing around aspersions. If anybody is going to accuse DPR of being sweetened up by Sony then you should also be saying they've been equally sweetened by Canon, if not more so.
2) There's a big difference between saying "these people accepted essentially a free holiday, so I don't trust that what they say is entirely impartial", and "this outlet has a brand bias". One is a harsh but not entirely unrealistic take; the other is straight-up libel. It may shock some people to learn this, but phrasing matters. There's a reason why even "opinion pieces" still have to be looked over by copy editors and have their wording chosen very carefully.
And before anybody repeats again the "oh it's just the internet, who cares/nothing will happen" schtick, bear in mind that this site itself can be held responsible for promoting libel if a company did wish to press the issue. In other words, regardless of whether an individual poster had legal action taken against them, this site could have action taken against it; you are putting CR itself in a dangerous position when someone makes these kinds of poorly-worded claims. And I'm sure the site owners will agree that they don't fancy taking those kinds of risks just so a few users can write "anti-Canon bias" on the forums.
So, again, choose words carefully is the point. It's okay to voice your distrust of an outlet, but it's a whole 'nother issue when you start using words like "bias".
No, there's no documented evidence of anybody at DPR working under an edict to intentionally slant reviews and copy. There
is documented evidence that staff at DPR have accepted some pretty nice weekends from multiple companies—every company, in fact—but acknowledging that is not the same as throwing around claims that writers have been bought. Again, see point #2 above. Phrasing matters.
It's also not "accusing" someone of using a penname on a forum when registering for the site makes that mandatory. That's simply an objective fact. Nor is simply reminding someone that their username does not protect them an accusation of anything, either, which is what was actually said.
And no, of course I'm not really Mr Ace Flibble, nor did I ever claim to be. I'm not a Mr, for a start.