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DxOMark says it has received money offers for review coverage
August 02, 2025
Camera ratings website DxOMark has received cash offers in exchange for covering specific phones and cameras, an executive has said.
In an interview withAndroid Headlines, marketing vice-president Nicholas Touchard said the company had received offers “many times” from companies wanting reviews for their products. Touchard noted that these offers weren’t meant to be bribes, but came from companies that didn’t “understand our business model.”
Read more:DxOMark changes testing protocol due to various camera improvements
“We have our own schedule [for reviewing products], we are not obliged to do any and don’t want to be obliged in the future,” the executive told the outlet. He added that DxOMark never accepted the cash offers.
The website publishes reviews in order to promote its benchmarking and consulting services but there are no plans to monetize the website itself, Touchard said.
No stranger to controversy
DxOMark delivers incisive analysis of smartphone cameras, but it’s one of the more controversial tech-related websites around. The company’s ratings have turned into a promotional tactic by phone manufacturers in recent years. In the past few months, we’ve seen the likes ofXiaomiandHuaweicite DxOMark ratings to claim photographic supremacy.
The controversy stems from its weighting of scores, for one.Android Authority‘s Robert Triggs broke down the issue in afeaturelate last year.
“The score weighting used in DxOMark’s latest smartphone scoring system is debatable. Phones can score additional points based on minor or more niche use cases such as software bokeh,zoomor video, while wide-angled, RAW, or monochrome capabilities aren’t considered in the final score,” Robert explained.
The score weighting and aforementioned consulting services mean DxOMark has a ton of influence on smartphone camera development. So while we’re glad to see the company stick to its guns, we do wonder if it’s time for an alternative camera rating platform.
Do we even need camera scores in the first place? After all, photography can be heavily subjective, and one person’s great photo could be another user’s terribly oversaturated mess. What do you look for in a smartphone camera? Let us know what you think in the comments section below!
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