About Camera Labs

Camera Labs is based in Queenstown, New Zealand, and edited by Gordon Laing, a British technology writer and former Editor of Personal Computer World – the first, and longest-running PC magazine in the UK. Over a 17 year career in journalism, Gordon has also reviewed products for magazines including Digital SLR User, Professional Photographer, MacUser, PC Pro, Computeractive, T3, The Times Educational Supplement, The London Evening Standard and The Register website.

He holds a degree in Physics from the University of Kent, has been a photographer for over 25 years and professionally reviewed digital cameras since their birth starting with the 0.3 Megapixel Apple QuickTake 100 back in 1995. His first book, Digital Retro, an illustrated history of home computers in the 80s, was published in October 2004 by Ilex Press and Sybex Books.

At Camera Labs, our policy is to test products in real-life outdoor conditions as we believe this greater reflects how they’ll be used rather than studio tests performed with two dimensional charts at close range under artificial light. As such our current camera reviews employ just one studio chart for technical resolution, beyond which all our tests are performed in and around the Queenstown area. You can find out more about our testing policy here. If you'd like to learn more about the Queenstown area and the locations used for our test and gallery shots, please see this thread in the Camera Labs forums!

Camera Labs has grown steadily since launch and in June 2009 served 3,466,669 page impressions over 803,044 visits. Our video reviews have been watched by over 10 Million people.

Additional reviews by Ken McMahon.
Original site design and programming by Nik Rawlinson.
Additional programming by Nick Jarman.
Logos and additional design by Jon Mason.

ISO and MTF test charts by Sine Patterns, supplied by Applied Image.
Geometry and uniformity results analysed by Imatest. Many thanks to Norman Koren.

Recommended sites
Several websites have been kind enough to link to our reviews. We greatly appreciate your support.

Many thanks to you all, and of course anyone we haven't mentioned!

How to support Camera Labs

Support us by shopping via the flags below or donating via PayPal!

The testing and reviewing undertaken at Camera Labs is a very time consuming process, and hosting the site is a significant expense. If you find our reports useful and would like to support Camera Labs, please consider shopping at our affiliate stores by first clicking through to them from our pages or via the flags on the left; you can also find the store logos on our reviews and on our affiliate stores page.

You pay exactly the same price as normal, but we receive a small referral fee which keeps us up and running. The referral fees also apply to books, DVDs or any other items, so there's no need to wait until you're shopping for a new camera! Alternatively, we can accept donations via PayPal. Once again, many thanks - your support really does allow us to continue delivering reviews.

How to contact Camera Labs
We welcome your comments on our site and take on-board any suggestions you have. If you'd like to make any comments, please click here or better still post your message in the Forum. Please note we cannot offer technical support or additional buying advice beyond that published in the reviews. If you'd like a recommendation, please visit our Buyers Guide. We are also unable to provide timescales on upcoming reviews.

If you'd like to contact us regarding advertising on Camera Labs, please use this enquiry form. Thanks!


How we test cameras and lenses
To learn how we put cameras and lenses through their paces, view our camera and lens testing page.


VIP code for forum registration
If you're registering on the Cameralabs forums, you'll need a VIP code. This is to reduce spammers and other automatic registrations. The current code is 7492. Note we have had to temporarily ban registrations from gmail accounts due to the large amount of spammers using them. Please register using a non-gmail account - thanks!

After completing the registration, you'll be sent an email to activate your account within a few moments. If you don't receive this email, first check your junk mail folder, as sometimes it's mistakenly filtered-out. We have found Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and Comcast accounts often don't appear to receive the message. If you haven't received the email after a few minutes, please email us with your Forum username at "contact at cameralabs.com" (replacing 'at' with the @ symbol) and we'll do our best to fix the problem and get you on-board!