SLR Lens Review turned five! It's hard to imagine that five years ago, the site went live with its first lens review - Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM. 150+ reviews later, here we are with a new redesign, new features and new goals. Well, goals actually remain the same - deliver you lens reviews first and foremost, but the scope of this goal changes a little bit. Instead of cranking out reviews as quickly as possible just to increase an article count, we're going to focus on improving quality of the reviews. This will probably mean slowing down somewhat - while it used to take about a week in the early days to test a lens and finish a review, lately it's been taking more like 3 weeks to wrap up with all the testings alone. Why the slow down, you might ask? Firstly, the scope of the reviews has been growing steadily over the years - five years ago the reviews contained only MTF test data from Imatest, then limited field testing was added, then field testing was expanded a bit, then expanded a bit more, and later a bit more again. All this requires additional time and with a busy work-day schedule this also means longer time lags. But don't fear - the reviews will continue and currently you should expect to see one to two new reviews per month.

The second objective is to begin offering more comprehensive lens comparisons. In the past, lens benchmarks were sporadic and did not follow any particular format. While not sure about the format for such comparisons yet, peer to peer lens comparisons will become more frequent. As a matter of fact, the first such comparison this year will pick up where the old Macro Challenge left off - wrapping up with a detailed contrast of 4 macro lenses: Canon EF 100/2.8, Zeiss Makro Planar 100/2, Leica APO Macro Elmarit 100/2.8 and Voigtlander APO Macro Lanthar 125/2.5. Expect that review to pop up in early February.