10 Years Later

Thanksgiving marks the tenth year of the Digital Camera Resource Page, my "baby". It all started back in 1997, when I was a student at UCSD. Since I worked at the UCSD Bookstore, I would tinker with the digital cameras that we sold whenever I had the chance. The first two cameras I was exposed to were the Apple QuickTake 150 (640 x 480, $700) and the Casio QV-10A (320 x 240, rotating lens).

I believe it was on the show floor of the Seybold Seminar that year when I came up with the idea of the DCRP. As I walked around, I took note of all the digital cameras being shown. I had already been running a site for owners of PowerComputing Mac clones, and thought I could use the same model on a digital camera site. Thus, in November of 1997, the DCRP site was born. It was really the first website of its kind.

Shortly after the site started, I bought my first camera: the Olympus D-300L, a sub-Megapixel camera which cost me around $1200 if I recall. Compared to today's cameras, the D-300L is awful, but back then, it was THE camera to have. I soon upgraded to the D-600L, which was the first 1+ Megapixel camera I owned. After that, I think I had a Nikon Coolpix 950, then an Olympus E-10, followed by the Canon EOS-20D, which I recently traded in for an EOS-40D.

When the DCRP site was about a year old, I started to think about shelving it. It was a lot of work, not many people were visiting, and it wasn't making much in the line of money. I'm glad I didn't give up, as soon, the digital camera market took off. The DCRP was soon eclipsed by more popular sites (DP Review and Steve's Digicams) that had the resources to update their sites frequently. Since it was more a side project than a job, nights and weekends were the only time I could update the DCRP site -- first in college, then when I had a "real" job. Thankfully, the site started making enough money to allow me to take over full-time, and in 2001 that's exactly what I did.

So here we are in 2007... in the past ten years, I've reviewed over 435 cameras (that's one review every 8 or 9 days), put 1200+ cameras into the Reviews & Info database, and written over 3400 news items. I've taken tens of thousands of photos (mostly of the same things) and sifted through what seems like millions of "what camera should I buy" e-mails. Somehow, through all this, my "famous" Mickey Mouse figurine has survived, though with Flame around, I'm thinking of buying a spare.

It's been a pretty good ten years. I'm very fortunate to have started the site when I did -- I really got in at the right time. This year's been a tough one, though I'm hoping that I can get things going in the right direction next year. I guess we'll find out how I fared this time next year!