Ready for her close-ups

SOMERVILLE -- Until a crew from ''CBS Sunday Morning" landed on the Tufts University campus to interview Robin Liss, most of her college friends had no idea what she was up to.

Little about the 21-year-old outwardly reveals her fascination with electronics or her business acumen. But Liss has been running a website that reviews camcorders since she was 13 years old. She has grown the business into a premiere source of consumer information, started a second site that reviews digital cameras, and -- with a year to go as a Tufts undergraduate -- employs 12 people from her offices in Davis Square.

With camcorderinfo.com and digitalcamerainfo.com, which are funded completely by advertising, Liss has carved an identity as an entrepreneur, and even a political warrior, at a tender age. But she says she prefers drawing an iron curtain between her entrepreneurial activities and the rest of her life.

''I didn't want to be a geek," Liss explains. ''I wanted to experience college life." She says she often runs her websites through her Blackberry, cellphone, and laptop, to ensure that she does not spend excessive hours at the office.

Michelle Engelson, 21, who has been a friend since Liss's freshman year at Tufts and was her sorority sister at the Chi Omega house before Engelson graduated this year, did not know about Liss's ventures until last fall.

''At Tufts, everyone's usually really busy," Engelson says. ''When she said she had to go do schoolwork or go to a meeting, no one ever questioned it." Engelson says the only tip-off that Liss's personal life was a little more complicated than she let on was her frequent travel to all parts of the country for business meetings or conventions. ''But she said she had to visit family or something, and no one badgered her about it or thought she was lying."

Liss has led a double life ever since high school in her hometown of Kalamazoo, Mich. For half the week she attended Loy Norrix High School , a local public school where her class numbered more than 400 students. For the rest of the time, she attended Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center, a magnet school where she was one of 55 students in her class. Students at Loy Norrix were a bit rough around the edges, and cooler than the students at the magnet school, she says.

It was the magnet school that cultivated Liss's interest in video that had started a few years earlier, when she would ask her parents to drop her off at Circuit City or Best Buy so she could play with camcorders for hours (she said she would alternate between the two stores so that neither would get suspicious of her spending so much time there).

Since those early days, Liss has gone on to appear on ''Fox and Friends Weekend" promoting certain camcorders as Father's Day gifts and on CNN's ''Reliable Sources," talking with Howard Kurtz about reviewers accepting favors from companies they review. Calling herself a ''huge Democrat," Liss has used camcorderinfo.com to channel her outrage at what she sees as the shaky ethics of some corporations and technology reviewers. She terms her websites the ''technology police."

Both camcorderinfo.com and digitalcamerainfo.com provide independent analysis of products, using testing equipment at the offices. A separate company manages the ads, so Liss says she never knows which ones are running. ''I always tell my employees, 'Don't you dare look at the ads or let that influence you.' Any hint of bias is unacceptable," she says. As a result, it is not unusual for a manufacturer to have an advertisement on one of Liss's sites at the same time the site is running a negative review of one of the manufacturer's products.

When Liss talks about her business, she often uses the vocabulary of a superhero fighting to save the world.

''This is where camcorders come to die," Liss says, pointing toward a room in the offices that is black from floor to ceiling, like a darkroom. ''We like to call it the death chamber."

In this room, which contains intricate charts and measuring devices, Liss and her employees test camcorders in key aspects such as color quality and resolution. Liss or one of her workers then posts the results on the website. Her tests sometimes show that certain features of the camcorder do not match the descriptions the manufacturer has given, she says. ''The companies will say it's a five-megapixel camera," says Liss, referring to the resolution quality. ''But it's always less, like four megapixels. If a camera's within 90 percent of what they say it is, it's good."

Liss points to a separate room where the camcorders are photographed for her website and tested for how wide an angle they shoot. ''We use lasers for this part," says Liss, her eyes growing wide. ''I like saying that we use lasers."

She proudly taps the door to her personal office, which is covered with images of the newest, sleekest camcorders.

''We like to call this the Kill Wall," Liss says, pumping her fist.

All the camcorders displayed on the door have been reviewed by camcorderinfo.com. Not all of them fared poorly, but Liss likes to emphasize her staff's killer instinct to reveal every flaw a camcorder might have.

Sources in the camcorder industry often give Liss inside information about new products before they are released, she says. ''I posted Sony's CES [Consumer Electronics Show] lineup in 2001 two months before it was announced. I heard later they really hated us," she says. Other companies have threatened to sue Liss if she did not reveal sources for her inside information, but she has held fast. ''I have a journalistic responsibility to protect them," she says.

Liss has never been sued, unlike her counterpart Nick dePlume, of the Apple Computer tracker thinksecret.com, who is fighting a lawsuit from Apple for revealing confidential information. Apple's lawsuit against thinksecret.com unnerves Liss because of the precedent it might set for companies silencing online media with scare tactics, she says.

Liss, a politics junkie, says she spends two hours every morning reading The Boston Globe, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and Jim Romenesko's journalism website. ''I admire the self-policing of journalists," she says. ''I'm a real media ethics dork. I think the technology industry doesn't do a good job of self-policing. That's what I'm proudest of with our sites. We'll take a lot of heat from companies for our reviews, but it's worth it."

Manufacturers might not always like it when Liss takes a critical stance, but they acknowledge her presence. When she was 16, Sony started sending her camcorders for review because its products were getting 5,000 hits a day on her site. Now, Canon, Panasonic, JVC, and others send camcorders to her. Digital cameras have also been streaming in for digitalcamerainfo.com to review. That site, which Liss started last year, is growing faster than camcorderinfo.com, she says, with a rapidly expanding audience that now numbers 170,000 visitors a month.

Camcorderinfo.com and digitalcamerainfo.com offer a comments section for each camcorder and digital camera reviewed, and these are usually filled with feedback from consumers.

Apart from running her websites, Liss, a political science major, worked full time last fall as a New Hampshire deputy press secretary for John Kerry's presidential campaign and is doing research for Tufts University's political science department this summer. While completing her junior year at Tufts this spring, Liss interned for the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Kamran Pourzanjani , CEO of the Los Angeles-based pricegrabber.com, has been Liss's mentor since 1999. ''Her site caught my attention pretty early on, especially because of the content and how many people were responding to it," he says.

Pourzanjani wanted to create a partnership between camcorderinfo.com and pricegrabber.com, which provides comparison shopping services to major Internet sites such as comcast.com and about.com. But he was unprepared for Liss's young age, even after speaking with her several times over the phone.

''My associate came in and told me her dad needed to sign the contract because she was still a minor," he says. ''Then I asked myself, 'Do we really want to do this?' " Pourzanjani took a closer look at camcorderinfo.com and went ahead with the partnership.

''She's definitely a couple steps beyond her age," he says. ''In fact, she's a few steps beyond most businesses in terms of being totally straightforward."

Liss is the editor in chief of camcorderinfo.com but has hired Emerson College graduate Alex Burack to be the editor in chief of digitalcamerainfo.com, because he knows more about digital cameras. ''I'd have to be an expert about digital cameras to edit that site, but I'm not," she says.

Working for Liss is fulfilling, Burack says, because she seeks feedback. ''She never just hands down orders. She's always looking for ways to fill the void of what our competitors aren't doing."

Liss gives all her employees health insurance benefits, and she recently granted a pregnant employee full maternity leave.

She says she might not hold onto her websites forever, but if she sells them, she will make sure they end up in the right hands -- people who are as eager as she is to expose corporate shortcomings and help the consumer. Until then, Liss will continue to be a thorn in the side of camera companies.

''We were the first to announce Panasonic's new high-definition camcorder in April -- another anonymous source," she says, beaming.

Globe staff editor Michael Prager contributed to this report.