FAQ

We get lots of email, feedback and forums comments from people asking the same questions about the site over and over again. This FAQ is designed to help those curious amongst you before you feel the need to comment.

Can I email you?

I really prefer it if you use our feedback page, I get well over 200 emails every day and thus it's very unlikely that I will be able to respond to any email sent. All feedback sent on our feedback page is read.

Please note, we can not and do not answer requests such has:

• "I need your advice on x"

• "When are you going to review x?"

• "Are you working on a review of x?"

• "I need a manual for my camera" *

• "I need a driver for my camera" *

• "Which camera should I buy?"

• "What's better x , y or z?"

• "I've got $x which camera should I get?"

* These questions will be answered on your manufacturers website

How come you gave camera X a 9.5 in 2000 and the new camera Y only an 8 this year?

Ratings are given at the time of review based on the state of the competition. Camera Y may well be a far better camera than camera X but it receives only an 8 (or whatever) because of its performance in comparison to other cameras in the same category at the time of review. It is impossible to rate cameras based on a 'future prediction'.

In what order is your review 'overall conclusion' rating?

Best to worst:

• Highly Recommended

• Recommended

• Above Average

• Average

• Below Average

• Poor

What do "pre-production" and "production" mean?

A pre-production digital camera is one prepared in a small batch for testing and training purposes. These small numbers of cameras are normally quite difficult to get hold of, however we often request them to enable us to deliver reviews to you more quickly. Typically finish quality (and even sometimes image quality) is not as good as the final product and we therefore clearly mark reviews based on pre-production cameras. A production digital camera is the same as one from the shelf in your local electronics store, it's made in the same mass production batch as all other digital cameras and will have a full serial number.

Do manufacturers pay you to write the reviews?

Absolutely not. We are an independent resource with the single minded aim of providing you with unbiased, factual and accurate reviews. We have never been offered, nor would accept payment to review any product. Nor do we accept gifts. All products are kept for an agreed loan period (typically two weeks) and returned afterwards. The exception are long term loan units which are sometimes kept for six months, these cameras are typically seen as the 'benchmark' and are used to aid comparison to upcoming competitive cameras.

Hey, how come you use "have" when describing a company rather than "has"?

Because I was born and educated here in Britain where the use of "have" after an organization name is perfectly acceptable (and widely used). When describing a collection you would use "They (have) frequently/often walked to work". A business / organization is a group of "things" and thus the use of have is perfectly acceptable.

How come my camera X doesn't appear in your four banners on the front page, isn't this favoritism ?

The four banners on the front page help to promote our last ten reviews, if we've not reviewed your camera or your favorite brands camera yet then it won't appear there. The system works like this:

First banner: Latest review posted on the site

Second, Third, Fourth banner: randomly chosen from the last 9 reviews (by date)

Thus, posting a new reviews pushes the oldest review off the list and that's why you may suddenly see a banner disappear. All reviews are available through the reviews link on the side menu bar. Try it, go to the front page and hit refresh a few times, each time you'll see a different 3 banners (after the 1st fixed one).

How come you represent brand X more than brand Y ?

We're an independent review site, as such we're at the whim (to a certain extent) of the manufacturers. We do all we can to represent all brands fairly, if one manufacturer drags its heels loaning us review equipment then we can hardly be blamed for not being able to review those cameras. We have in the past taken alternative routes to get our hands on cameras which are unavailable directly from the manufacturer. We work very very long hours producing the most detailed reviews we can, even if we receive a camera today you won't see a review for at least two weeks.

We always try to be as objective as possible in our reviews and receive a lot of praise for our straight talk and detailed tests.

How come you've not reviewed camera X yet ?

Probably because the manufacturer hasn't sent us a review sample or that they have and it's simply too pre-production (too flaky, not representative of final product) to review. We also have a limited amount of resource to review cameras, we'll often select the most interesting / innovative or popular camera to review in great detail rather than trying to review everything in a shallow manner.

Hey, I saw camera X in the shop the other day, and you're saying you can't review it ?

We're based in the UK, as such it's sometimes difficult to get cameras which are released six months earlier in The States, most of the major manufacturers have worked on ways to help us with this situation, some of the smaller ones are catching up.

You said you're working on a review of this camera, how come you've not posted a review yet ?

Because our reviews are the most comprehensive and detailed on the net, it takes us considerably longer to produce our reviews than some of the other sites. Our normal turnaround time for a single camera is 10 working days (not that the weekends normally stop us) and if we have more than one camera in then that may impact on how long it takes.

I'm posting on the forums, is my email address protected?

Yes, in a word. We did have a bout in early 1999 of a (rather amateur but effective) "leech" (automated device designed to suck email address off websites) sucking our database, as soon as we discovered it (within an hour or so) we removed all email addresses from forums messages and put several systems in place to ensure your email addresses are protected (obviously we can't describe them in much detail as that would compromise security).

I've just received a "Sorry, no site leeching software allowed" message when trying to download your site, what's going on?

This is part of our anti-leeching and privacy measures, several reasons: (a) on several occasions these "robots" have gone out of control on the site generating large amounts of transfers (and thus bandwidth), with the advent of ADSL and Cable Modems it's very easy for an out of control robot to bring a site to a crawl (or cost us a lot in bandwidth charges). (b) all the material on the site is copyrighted, we're not happy about downloading the site as a whole. (c) to protect your identity, although we protect email addresses in the forums as a double safety measure banning robots also helps to cut down the "amateur" leech. (d) the site changes often, to keep an offline version up to date you'd need to refresh an offline cache several times a day, it just isn't practical.

If you have a complaint or comment please direct them to: info@rightmarkets.com.