Magazines Popular Photography & Imaging
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - Good price but don't bother.
So when did Popular Photography begin publishing again, even if now under the name Popular Photography & Imaging? I had a 2 year subscription. They told me they were going to stop publishing, and switched my subscription over to Outdoor Photographer. It's all ads, anyway. You'd think they would let me know they were starting up again if that's what happened.

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Rating: - Too many advertisements and not enough content
Magazine keeps you in touch with respect to new equipment (i.e., advertisments especially but also product reviews) and some technique. But just too many damn advertisements.

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Rating: - Good value for beginners
I subscribed to this magazine a few months ago. Via Amazon, or the magazine itself, it's about a dollar an issue. For that price, you really can't go wrong. I'm a relative amateur, and I'm starting to look for ways to get better. "Popular Photography" provides me with information and tips that a beginner can use to improve his or her photos. I can see that the magazine would be less useful to more advanced amateurs or to pros; "Photo Techniques" would be a better resource for those people. Indeed, I may subscribe to that magazine when my subscription to "Popular Photography" runs out. Nevertheless, I am a happy subscriber to "Popular Photography," and I am satisfied with the magazine.

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Rating: - Good product reviews
I've been a reader of Popular Photography for some time and find it useful, but certainly not perfect. The strength of the magazine is that the testing of cameras and related gear is very quantitative in nature and allows you to compare similar products objectively. This is obviously the first priority of the editorial staff and they do a good job of it. The only thing I would fault on their reviews is that they aren't always pointed enough in pointing out one product's shortcomings compared to others in the same category. They do, however, offer more of this type of feedback than just about any other magazine I've seen so it is a relative weakness at worst. Some magazines, like Shutterbug, just offer gushing subjective reviews for every product they cover and Popular Photography definitely lives up to a much higher standard.

With regard to the remaining content, the magazine plummets in terms of quality. There are frequent "how to" articles that have sunk to a point of being almost laughable. Never a strong point, in the past six months I've seen more and more articles demonstrating techniques to achieve an effect in some photo that I would delete if I had taken it... yet it's held up as some sort of shining goal that I should aspire to. It seems to this reader that the editorial staff needs a good shake up and the magazine a good going-over from top to bottom to get things on track.

Overall, I consider this magazine worth subscribing to. But only barely. At the low per-issue cost of a subscription I'll get enough product information to make it worth my while. But if you aren't into photo gear and have no intention of buying a camera in the next year or so I don't think I'd recommend it for you.