62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
Good general purpose mag
Pop Photo is a good general purpose photography magazine. The coverage of new trends and products is good and the techncial reviews of equipment can't be beat.
There is a tendency for the editorial staff to be combative with letter writers (check the letters to the editor). This can be annoying, and fortunately they've mellowed out a bit over the past couple of...
78 of 81 people found the following review helpful:
Best Magazine for Product Reviews.
I have subscribed to Popular Photography for about 5 years. I intend to continue subscribing because it has the most product reveiws of any photo magazine that I have encountered. It allows me to keep up with what's new in the way of equipment. Of particular interest are the lens tests. Pop Photo tests most new lenses for 35 mm cameras, which is more than any other source...
This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
I have subscribed to Popular Photography for about 5 years. I intend to continue subscribing because it has the most product reveiws of any photo magazine that I have encountered. It allows me to keep up with what's new in the way of equipment. Of particular interest are the lens tests. Pop Photo tests most new lenses for 35 mm cameras, which is more than any other source that I know of.
Now to the bad part: I find that the articles that are not related to products reviews are primarily intended for novices, and they are very repetitive. If you've subscribed for more than a year, you will find that many basic subjects are treated over and over again. And I have always been disappointed in the subjects of the articles, which are just very unimaginative. Photography is such a huge subject, with many interesting and idiosyncratic techniques available. There is no need to stick to the same handful of subjects. It's uninspirational, and it's bad editing, frankly. I do like Herb Keppler's monthly column. He's a plain-spoken guy who usually has something useful to say. More evidence of editorial laziness is that Pop Photo essentially puts their annual product guides in the magazine. This means that several of their issues are dominated by pages and pages of charts telling you what is available this year in SLR's, point-and-shoots, film, zoom lenses, etc. There is very little else in those issues. Other magazines put their product guides in a separate publication that is available on the newsstand.
In summary, Pop Photo has a wide audience and a lot of potential, but needs a better Editor. The product reviews and tests are worth the price of the subscription to me, but that is really what the magazine excells at.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
Pop Photo is a good general purpose photography magazine. The coverage of new trends and products is good and the techncial reviews of equipment can't be beat.
There is a tendency for the editorial staff to be combative with letter writers (check the letters to the editor). This can be annoying, and fortunately they've mellowed out a bit over the past couple of years.
Good travel photo column, and the readers photos segement is the first thing I look for every issue.
One caveat, if you're a digital photographer looking for in-depth digital how-tos this isn't the mag for you.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
I have been a subscriber for a few years and have found alot of the articles repetitive and not all that educational. Recently I have subscribed to Shutterbug which is a much better magazine for both the novice and professional photographer. Its articles are insightful and even after many years they still can teach this old photographer a few new tricks !!!!
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
The Good
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* This is a nice magazine for the price.
* It has some informative articles, which maybe useful to newcomers to photography in general or the digital aspects of photography.
* If you are getting started in photography, or you are at a beginner/amateur level, this magazine can be very helpful as a stepping stone
* If you are an experienced amateur/pro, you can still like this magazine, but don't expect many in-depth/advanced topics.
* The Monthly Lens reviews are helpful to SLR/DSLR users
* For people who like to flip through magazines and even look at ads from different vendors, this is a good resource.
The Not so good
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* The technical reviews of digital cameras are skin-deep compared to the in-depth technical reviews by the online photography sites (such as dpreview).
* Sometimes the reviews are word-smithed in such a way that they avoid saying negative things, so -at times- you have to pick-up on what is not said in the review in order to figure out if there's something wrong with a product.
* The "News" are 4-12 weeks behind real time.
* If you expect in-depth or pro-level articles, those are rare.
Consumer beware segment
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Towards the back of the magazine there are plenty of ads from various mail-order vendors. Some of them are very reputable, honorable and reliable vendors such as B&H and J&R.
However, some other vendors are less than stellar - to put it in mildly. You will recognize them by the too-good-to-be-true super-low prices, and they usually practice "bait & switch" among other things. These have been documented on various websites and photography forums. If you are not familiar with all these, and you see prices that are very low, you may want to do some research before purchasing.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
As a budding amateur photographer, I was hoping this magazine would have good tips and interesting articles. But, instead, there's a lot of product reviews for things that I don't need. It's fine to have one section on products, but I didn't know that's what the whole magazine was about. I have a year subscription, but I just keep throwing the magazines away when they arrive. I don't have the inclination to look through them anymore.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
This definitely a magazine for gearheads. It's pretty much just equipment reviews and advertisements. I would have given it a higher rating but for two things:
1) I don't think I've ever seen Popular Photography not LOVE any piece of equipment. The reviews can still be useful if you're just wondering what features the new gizmo has, but still, they ought to be a bit more critical if they're going to be such a review based magazine.
2) Many of the ads are from vendors with bad reputations. I believe they make some sort of claim about requiring a certain level of honesty from anyone they sell ad space from, but it sure doesn't look like they have ever kicked anyone out of the magazine to me.
So what do you have when you have a magazine full of uncritical reviews, the occasional beginnerish article about technique, and a lot ads from stores of dubious virtue? At best a 2 star magazine.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
Popular Photography seems to be one of the magazines that all photographers subscribe to (the only one I've found more professionals subscribe to is Shutterbug). The magazine is full of product reviews and technical articles, and there is a column on just about every area of photography. One major fault of the magazine is that about a third to half the magazine is advertising and mail order shops. It's good to know where to go if you want to purchase a new camera, but it can be a bit much. The other fault is that there are no articles covering the artists or any nontechnical issues. This magazine has a lot of potential to be useful to the photographer, but you often times find it falling a bit short.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
As others have said, this magazine is maybe useful if you're a total beginner. Every issue is essentially the same--so much so that I can't even tell them apart from looking at the covers. Also if you own a camera already, much of the magazine is irrelevant product reviews.
This magazine truly caters to the lowest common denominator. Letters to the editors are petulant and unnecessary (one even complained about the use of the word "photo" instead of "photograph"). Don't expect a single to issue to go by without some uninformed digital vs film mudslinging.
This magazine is not about photography as art so much as photography as a technical process. The pictures included are usually techincally very good and aesthetically interesting, but very very conventional landscapes, wildlife, and portraits. Don't expect any innovation and risk here. For a magazine that focuses on the art of photograpy consider something like JPG magazine.
If you're a beginner this may help you out, and if you're on the market for a new piece of equipment the reviews could be useful. Otherwise, expect to find the same information rehashed ad nausium, ignorant pundants trying to sound important, and columns and articles that manage to spend several pages saying nothing. Oh, and you can see some nice but generic pictures.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
I subscribed to multiple photography magazines at first when I started getting serious about photography. I subscribed to 'Photography' and 'American Photo' and this one, Popular Photography and Imaging.
Of the three this magazine has the most balanced amount of reviews, 'how tos', digital imaging related topics (Photoshop, etc) as well as some nice contests. Also they seem to sponsor more 'mentor series' type products where you can go to some locale and shoot photos for a reasonable fee.
Of all the magazines this also had something that was important to me - half the magazine isn't ads. Photography was the worst offender of this, there'd be 50 or so pages of weak articles, and then 50 pages solid of ads. While this one does have a chunk of ads near the back, it still has a 'back page' article and articles mixed in among the ads. And only 25% of the magazine is advertisements.
They also support a nice online website (popphoto.com) and have a forum where people can logon and ask questions. While not as heavily trafficked as say dpreview.com the authors and editors do read and respond to questions. Overall a great magazine for the hobby.
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This review is from: Popular Photography (Magazine)
I've subscribed to PPI off and on for many years (including when it was Pop. Photog.). I agree with the reviewer who said that reviewers tend to be mostly positive about reviewed products--however, they're better than they used to be and do, in fact, mention problems. In addition some other photog. mags simply don't do bad reviews at all. One of the rationales photog mags sometimes use is that they don't want to publicize bad products so they don't review them. Hmmmm...
Also, it's true that many articles are superficial or rehashes of past "how-to" articles for near beginners, but they do sometimes cover other aspects of photography, and they do have profiles of photographers and their work from a variety of different fields, which I find interesting.
My biggest gripe with PPI is that they are hyperbolic about any new development or product, so there is a lot of: "We finally got our hands on the new Kamera S&M2000 which is now the top of Kamera's line. Kamera has completely redisigned the grip which is now a different shape and has a small patch of nubbly rubber on it. And we were surprised to discover that the button for releasing the flash is now mounted on the SIDE of the camera!" Etc., etc. Everything new is incredible, stunning, radical, amazing, worth a close look, etc. Truly radical developments just don't happen once/month like clockwork in photography, but they go for headlines instead of stories in depth....
Also a pain are evaluations of color films with numerous side by side shots all limited by the magazine printing process and many of which look nearly identical...which is a tad funny, actually.
Bottom line is: read it for a year and then subscribe to something else for a while. Helps to get more info and you can compare different approaches by mag editors that way.
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