A reader asked a fair question: how do I know your reviews aren't just unboxings with better vocabulary? Fair deserves an answer on the record, so this page is the standing methodology behind every review on this site. It's linked from the reviews section and it applies retroactively.
Time in service beats time to publish
The core standard: gear gets reviewed after real use in real work, and the review says how long that was. Some of the hardware covered here has a decade of service behind the verdict. Nothing gets a recommendation off bench impressions, because the failures that matter, the walked-off small parts and the mechanism that gets gritty in year 2, don't happen on a bench in week one.
Where a product is newer to me, the review says so plainly, and the verdict is scoped to what the time in service can support.
Where the gear comes from
Most of what's reviewed here I bought at retail, before any company knew this site existed, and the buying habit long predates the writing habit. That's the baseline that keeps the judgments honest: the drawer of also-rans purchased with my own money is the control group every recommendation gets measured against.
Some products now arrive through affiliate or review arrangements, and the rules for those are simple. Every such relationship is disclosed in the review it touches. No company sees a review before publication or edits a word of it, and an arrangement buys consideration, never a conclusion. A free product that loses to something I paid for gets told so in print.
What gets a product excluded
Not everything sent or pitched gets covered. Gear gets declined or dropped when it duplicates something already reviewed without improving on it, when the category is outside actual field use here, or when the vendor's terms include any form of approval, preview, or "feedback before publishing." That last one is automatic and permanent.
Corrections
When a review turns out wrong, because a product failed after publication or a long-term flaw surfaced, the review gets updated with a dated note rather than quietly rewritten. Long-term reviews are only worth reading if the record stays honest when the verdict ages badly.
That's the whole methodology. It fits on one page because most of it amounts to a single rule: use the thing for real, then say what happened.