Review methodology
This page describes what every site in the network does to write a review. Each site also publishes its own methodology page covering what is particular to its category.
We do not use the products
A review here is a reading of a record — what the manufacturer publishes about a product — not an account of the product in use. We do not buy, unbox, run, wear or sleep on anything. The word "review" describes the writing, not a test, and every review says so in its own text.
What is read
A review starts from the product's listing, its specification table, and where available the manufacturer's own product page and manual. The figures a review quotes are the manufacturer's figures, restated. Where a figure is published under a stated condition — hours of video at a set brightness, a noise level at a stated distance, a capacity at a stated test load — the condition is quoted with it, because the bare number means something different without it.
Where a listing does not state a field, the review reads not stated. It is never filled with a category default, a typical value or a figure from a similar model.
How a figure is judged
A specification is only useful against a question. Each category has a handful of questions its buyers actually have — will it fit, will it be loud, will it last the day, does it need something the listing does not mention — and a review reads the figures against those, for the home the category implies. It says who the numbers suit and who they do not. It does not rank the product against others, because we have not used any of them.
What is not published
- Star ratings and review counts. They belong to the retailer and describe other people's experience, not the specification.
- Exact prices. A price captured on one day is wrong by the time you read it. The retailer's page has the only true one.
- Accessories, parts and consumables. These sites review products, not their cases, filters, cartridges or mounts. Reviews of those that were once published are no longer indexed.
Categories
A product is filed by what it is, not by what the listing calls it or the search that surfaced it. A bundle is filed with its main product. A product that fits no category on a site is not reviewed there.
Where this fails
- A manufacturer's figure can be optimistic or measured under conditions it does not state. A review can check it against its own category; it cannot check it against reality.
- A review cannot tell you anything a specification does not encode: how a thing feels, sounds or ages, or whether it will still be supported in three years. Those are what using it would tell you, and this network does not do that.
- Where a listing covers several variants under one entry, the figures may describe a different variant than the one pictured.
- Listings change. A review describes the listing as it was read, and says when.
Corrections
If a figure is wrong, we would like to know precisely which one: a product, a field, and what the listing actually says. Send it here, or to the site that published it.