Author: Editor

Snapsort.com Updated: Prices, new cameras, and more

Today we released an update to Snapsort.com.  It includes: prices for most cameras currently available for sale, links to buy those cameras, recently announced cameras, and a few small updates.

Pricing 

Snapsort.com now integrates pricing data from a few retailers, allowing us to do two things:

  • Include current street prices in camera comparisons
  • Give links to buy cameras at online retailers

For example, if you compare the Canon Rebel T1i to the Nikon D90 snapsort.com will tell you that the best price we’ve seen for the T1i is $146 less (as of today).

You can now click through to a page about any specific camera, so if you look at the page about the Rebel T1i you’ll see that we have pricing for the camera body only, and in kits, from a few different retailers!

 
Recently Announced Cameras
Snapsort.com now includes a number of new cameras released in 2010.  It can be interesting to compare new releases against the previous year’s model to see what has changed! For example:

Camera Pages

As I mentioned above, snapsort.com now has individual camera pages – previously we had only comparison pages.

These pages are fairly bare bones at this point, and we’ll be filling them out over time.  They include a brief overview of the camera, specifications, prices, and competitors.

Small Improvements

We’ve made a few other small improvements.

Camera comparisons now include a few more features in the differences and similarities section: widest aperture, RAW shooting capability, price and annnounced date.

For example, if you compare the Panasonic DMC-ZS3 to the Canon S90 you’ll see that Snapsort points out that the S90 has a wider aperture (f/2 vs f/3.3) which lets in 1.4 f-stops more light!

Other small improvements include a couple bug fixes and image improvements pointed out by users at our support community.

Stay in touch

If you’d like to hear about future improvements, there’s a whole ton of ways to stay in touch with us including: following @snapsort on twitter, subscribing to our blog, or becoming a fan at facebook.

We’d also like to hear from you!

Snapsort.com: Reflecting on our launch

Snapsort.com went live about three weeks ago. We thought we were launching such a small set of features that not many would be interested in. Our goal was to see if we could get some organic google traffic. Somehow we attracted thousands of visitors!

Backstory

Our vision for snapsort.com is a site that gives personalized unbiased camera recommendations, we imagine it being a bit like a conversation with a good friend who knows a lot about cameras (see my blog post).

Instead of spending ages building this incredible site and then releasing it all at once, our plan is to release little pieces of it at a time, and get feedback as we go. On January 6th we started by launching a camera comparison feature.

Traffic

We didn’t expect many people to visit our site. We thought the camera comparison feature was slightly interesting, but didn’t really think anyone else would find it useful on its own, to us it was just a step along the way to our vision.

We hoped we might start to get some traffic from Google, and we thought our friends and family would visit. And on the first few days it was just friends and family visiting. But a few days later, a few photography sites found the site, and blogged about it, sending us thousands of visitors over night!

We’ve now had over 49,000 visits to our site according to Google Analytics. Now many sites receive way more visits than that every day, but its way more than we thought we’d have at this point.

Traffic has since died back down, but we’ve now gained a small audience of interested users, and found out that if you build something interesting and useful that people love they will tell others about it.

Usage and Feedback

During those 49,000 visits, we’ve had over 6,000 separate combinations of cameras compared!

Shortly after launch we added a feature to show the most popular comparisons on the our home page, and on each comparison page shows a list of other popular comparisons for each of those cameras.

Whats Next

We’re still working away on new features for the site, so stay tuned!  Feel free to join in the conversation at our support site, or follow us on facebook or twitter.

Snapsort.com Updated: Popular Comparisons and More

We’ve made another minor update to Snapsort.com today!

Here’s what’s new:

1. Popular comparisons on the main page

The welcome page on snapsort.com now features the 6 most popular comparisons by users!

Right now it looks like its quickly become dominated by SLR-SLR comparisons, though for a while the Canon G10 vs Canon G11 was quite popular, and you can see the Canon G11 vs Canon S90 on this screen shot.

2. Popular comparisons for each camera on comparison pages

On each comparison page, we now show 6 popular other cameras that each of the two has been compared against, so you can see what other people have been comparing that camera to.

Here is a screen shot showing the current popular cameras that people have compared against the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1.

3. Quick access to launch a new comparison

We’ve added a comparison search on the top right of the comparison screen, which we hope will make it faster/easier for you to change one of the cameras in the comparison, say you’re comparing one particular model against a number of other models.

4. A laundry list of small fixes including:

5. Small tweaks to the SnapRank algorithm

Point and shoots used to have an unfair advantage against SLRs, that has been improved now, but it still needs work.

6. Added a slightly humorous page to show you if you try to compare a camera against itself 

Try it!

Snapsort.com Updates

We’ve just pushed a couple of tweaks to snapsort.com!  These are pretty minor, but we felt they needed to be addressed quickly.

Getting the comparison you asked for

A few people had pointed out to us that when they’d requested a comparison of one camera they might get a comparison of another camera. 

Behind the scenes there are a number of cameras that are given different names in different geographic regions, for example the camera known as the Canon Rebel T1i in North America is known as the Canon EOS 500D in Europe.  Initially we had this represented as just one camera in our system with two names, and one of the names was chosen arbitrarily as the main name.

We’ve improved how this works now, representing alternate names as separate (but related) cameras, so people who ask for a comparison of the Canon Rebel T1i vs the Canon Rebel XS will get the comparison they asked for!

Improved Comparison Search

The comparison search boxes will now find the camera you’re looking for even if you don’t type in (or use the auto completion) to find the full name.  For example, if you type in “Canon 40D” and not use the auto completion, we’ll now find the right camera without you having to type in “Canon EOS 40D”.

Improved Autosuggest

Previously when you typed in something like “Nikon” into a comparison search we’d show you a rather arbitrarily sorted list of cameras.  Now, the list of suggestions is sorted first by match closesness (as it was before) and then by new-ness of the camera, so if you type in “Nikon” you’ll see a list of the the most recent cameras released by Nikon.

Keep the feedback coming, thanks!

Behind the screens: Snapsort team photos

Before we launched the site, we needed some photos for snapsort.com. They say that constraints inspire creativity, and indeed they do. Our office is rather small and unglamorous, and the only nice light seems to be from the front door. I had to squish up against the wall and lean over my desk to get a photo. On the left is a shot of our setup (taken on an iPhone).
Here is one of the final shots, taken with my Nikon D700, at 85mm, f/3.5. I took the initial shots at f/1.8, but the depth of field was SO narrow that I sometimes got eyes out of focus but eyebrows in focus 🙂