We wanted to create a way to go beyond specs and allow you to compare and choose a camera based on real-world photos taken by real people. Could photographers take the same quality photo with an iPhone 5 as they do with a Nikon D3100? Find out on Camera Showdown, the results may surprise you. You can also check out results for popular DSLR comparisons like the D5100 vs T4i.

We gather photos from around the web and find similar pictures based on tags, image orientation and EXIF settings. We then offer up pairs of photos based on the collected data.

With Camera Showdown you can:

• Do a blind comparison of pictures from popular cameras, like a Pepsi Taste Challenge for cameras.
• Compare your results with other users and see how they stack up to yours.
• Share your results and challenge your friends on Facebook and Twitter

Check out Camera Showdown, take the challenge and see if you pick your favorite camera as the best.

If you have any questions email us at Beta@Snapsort.com, Thanks.

We felt the web was a treasure trove of information; being geeks we knew you could harness it to make great decisions, but we were incredibly frustrated with the time it took to unearth the details you needed. Information is spread thin, hidden in forums and locked in reviews; we’d find ourselves reading 15 articles before we found the perspective and info that we needed. Parsing through newsgroups run by rabid fans or digging up specs on a manufacturer web site wasn’t something you could do when you just wanted to make a great decision fast. Even worse, searching with Google and trying to find the right data using a tiny mobile screen is an exercise in self-punishment. Mobile needs a paradigm shift in how people find answers.  We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on cameras, honing our recommendation skills in a space we enjoyed and felt we could provide value.  In 2011 we began the quest to transfer what we’d learnt in cameras and apply it to more products.   We launched Sortable.com in Jan 2012 and it was the culmination of our efforts to go beyond cameras.

In the last couple of years we’ve taken the service from zero to almost four million visitors a month. We’ve done this with nine employees, and minimal funding. We’re just a bunch of engineers with an idea. Right now we’re helping people make better decisions on what camera, phone, laptop, tv, lens, and tablet they buy. We’re very proud of this! With snapsort.com we have built one of the largest photography gear sites on the Internet.

The problem is we want to go faster. Much faster. Our technology has come a long way and we want to help people make all kinds of decisions not just gadgets. A competitor, Hunch.com, had an immense promise that we all loved but, ultimately, it failed to catch on with consumers. Our technology does work, users love it, return rates are drastically reduced, conversions are drastically increased and we offer advertisers a unique opportunity to engage users in a hyper-focused manner. We want to finish what we started and fulfil our vision of helping consumers make better decisions in all the areas of their life. We’re focused on organizing the web’s knowledge in a structured way and we didn’t want to get gobbled up and have our mission aborted by corporate overlords.

We’ve spent the last six months looking at how we can grow the business: where we can get the resources, what kind of dilution we’ll take, and how do we keep control. Along the way we started the conversation with Ted Hastings about what it would take to build a global scale consumer web business in Canada. Canada is not considered a consumer web powerhouse; SaaS, e-commerce, apps, and B2B are a different story but the Facebooks, Yelps, AirBNBs, Pintrests and Kayaks don’t seem to come out of Canada.

We want to grow our audience by an order of magnitude in the next couple years and that’s where Rebellion comes in to play.  At Sortable we’re focused on mining the web for interesting data, building engaging communities, driving personalized answers based on huge data sets, driving conversions to retailers, and generating unique advertising opportunities.

Rebellion provides us a home where our mission gets supercharged, where we’re tasked with taking our technology and applying it to everything from real estate, movies, and restaurants to mutual funds, fashion, and travel. At Rebellion we’re going to have a simple mission: take what we do and do it at huge scale.

For our users, nothing is changing. We’re going to grow the team (we’re hiring!) as fast as we can and give you way more awesomeness. We’re staying in Waterloo. We hope the only thing you notice is how much better the service gets. We have a lot in the pipeline ready for August launch.

For our fellow lovers of photography we hope the expanded resources will mean an even better snapsort and the same great experience you’ve come to love translated to all the things you need.  Thanks for loving what we do and supporting us.

Stay tuned.

Chris, Alex, Mark and the Snapsort/Sortable Team

Sorting through all the available information, opinions, data and making sense of it the way an expert would is a major pain in the derriere, we’re going to change that. The whole team has been working like crazy through Christmas and new years to get this baby live. Sortable is the culmination of a lot of R&D, testing, successes and failures and we couldn’t be more excited for people to try it out.

Over the next few months we’ll be continuing to add more and more products and services that you’d like help making decisions on (you can vote on domains you’d like to see covered here). We’re very proud of what we’re launching today but there is still so much more we want to accomplish.

We hope you enjoy our creation and give us feedback on how we can improve it.

Over a Million in a Year

For the past couple years we’ve been working hard at improving snapsort.com, thankfully we’ve had some strong success, the photography community has helped make us the second largest website providing camera gear advice (next to Amazon’s dpreview).  We launched the first full version of our camera site in June 2010, about a year later we’re helping over a million people every month find the right camera. You can celebrate with us and get a chance to win a Nikon D3100 or Canon S95 (donated by the awesome crew at Adorama)

When we started Snapsort we had a simple goal: “help consumers make informed purchasing decisions quickly”.  We had broad goals, we were so incredibly frustrated with how hard it was to find the right product for oneself we wanted to make it easier for every single purchasing decision.  We needed to first prove we could help one group of people before we went off helping a thousand, so we focused on cameras and refined our recommendation platform.

Two years later we’ve developed a mature, stable and extremely helpful recommendation platform that we’re ready to scale out.  Our goal is 20 categories by the end of the year.  We’re hiring super smart engineers if you want to help us reach this goal .

Yesterday we launched our new recommendation platform in 3 verticals:

• Cars – carsort.com
• Mobile Phones – geekaphone.com
• Cameras - snapsort.com (revamped to run on our new platform)

Snapsort is working hard on developing a new website to help you find the best cell phone and wireless carrier. Our new website, Geekaphone is still a few months away, but today we are happy to launch our first component of Geekaphone, a Mobile Speed Test, which lets you:

• See how fast your wireless carrier is (upload, download, latency)
• Check your phones browser’s performance
• See what phones are faster on your network (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Rogers, Bell)
• Challenge your friends to see who’s phone is the fastest

To run the Geekaphone Mobile Speed Test go to geekaphone.com/mobile-speed-test on your phone, or scan this QR code. There is nothing to install, just click Run! and in a few seconds you will find out just how fast your phone is. Then you can brag to your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or even challenge them to a head to head competition.

Our leaderboard updates live as people test their phones, so you can see which phones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) and carriers are the fastest.

Please test your phone, challenge your friends and give us some feedback on our new mobile speedtest.

You see, our business requires a lot of complex and exciting engineering work (P.S. we’re hiring), which means we need to hire world class coders.  The city we live in is a big part of that. Waterloo is a fantabulous region.  Seriously: it’s awesome.  Like other big tech centres that went before us, someone, on some council, in a place called city hall made a decision for or against a rail system.  Well, it’s now our turn to make that decision.

Since Snapsort is all about helping people make better decisions we thought we’d create a super ginormous infographic on all the talking points.  We hope the techies, students, and Waterloo Region lovers will read this, and share it with their friends. (YES, PLEASE POST, TWEET AND SHARE – embed code below the infographic.)

Waterloo Region has undergone explosive growth — it’s a legitimate success story — largely because we have three universities/colleges and a whole lot of talented techies doing cool stuff.  Tech is now our economic heart: manufacturing has left, and Blackberries, Open Text, Desire2Learn, Kik, and hundreds of other have moved in.  There is a small and vocal minority who don’t want a large, super fantastic and dominant urban tech centre, and who think rail systems are silly.   We don’t really agree with this segment although we love that they have an opinion.  What’s your opinion?

Christopher Reid, Snapsort co-founder

Sources in comments

How to Share
Please do share and re-post the infographic. All we ask is that you provide attribution back to snapsort.com and link to the original infographic. Thanks!

<a href="http://blog.snapsort.com/files/2011/05/LRT-for-Dummies.jpg"><img width="650" height="8660" src="http://blog.snapsort.com/files/2011/05/LRT-for-Dummies.jpg" title="LRT for Dummies" alt="Waterloo Region rapid transit options"/></a><br /> <a href="http://snapsort.com">Snapsort</a>'s <a href="http://blog.snapsort.com/2011/05/11/lrt-for-dummies/">LRT for Dummies</a> Infographic

• The ability to compare more that 2 cameras at once
• Linking the camera pages to other reviews, camera manuals and other information about the cameras
• Examples of photos taken by each camera
• Review video cameras like we review digital cameras
• Move the score to the top of the comparison pages
• Include LensHero lens suggestions in the camera pages

Thanks for all the great suggestions. We are working hard to make Snapsort better and we can not do it without you.
There were two categories in the Snapsort community feedback contest, one for bloggers who wrote about Snapsort and gave us feedback and another for our community. We had just over 1,000 people enter the contest, so we determined winners by using Random.org.

The winners of Contest A (bloggers):
Grand prize a Nikon D3100 body

• Tomasz

Photojojo Coffee Mug

• Matthew
• Courtney
• Alexander
• Naomi
• Britton
• Olivia
• Harry
• Nathan
• Masoud
• Manjari

The winners of Contest B (users):
Grand prize a Canon Powershot SD1400 IS

• Stu

Photo Jojo mug

• Dennis
• Lindsey

A one of a kind Snapsort T-Shirts

• James
• Jackie
• Vincent
• Adam
• Cate
• Mike
• Darren
• Eric
• Shawana

We wanted to highlight some blogs that really stood out:
Clean Cut Well Kept
Recursion

Congratulations to all our winners, and thanks again for all your support.

New Additions to Snapsort

• User Contributed Videos - Sometimes words alone don’t do a camera justice.  Video to the rescue!  Snapsort has added tree types of videos:
  • Camera reviews
  • Sample videos from the cameras
  • How-to tutorials

 
• User Voting – We recognize that many of our users know a lot about cameras and photography, and we want to incorporate that expertise into Snapsort.com. We’ve implemented the first revision of our comparison voting system. When you compare two cameras, you will be able to vote and see how other people have voted on different aspects of the camera.

• More Information – The more info the better when it comes to making decisions, so we’ve added the following info to our DSLR and mirrorless camera reviews:
  • HDR – in camera high dynamic range capabilities
  • Panorama mode
  • 3D
  • Weather sealed
  • Autofocus type (contrast-detect, phase-detect, # of focus points, # of cross-focus points, lag)
  • Movie autofocus type (see above)
  • Sensor cleaning
  • External mic
  • Shutter lag
  • Battery life (# of shots per battery charge using CIPA standards)

Contest Details

Last but not least we REALLY REALLY want your help in determining:

• What features to build next
• How to improve on existing features

This is the part where we ask you to help celebrate these new features and give us feedback on how to improve.
Help us improve – Win a Nikon D3100
You could win this great DSLR just by providing us with your well thought out feedback. Simply blog to your audience about our latest changes and how we can improve.  Be sure to give examples and specifics that we can reference in order to make the improvements.  We will also send you a Snapsort T-shirt as big giant thank you just for participating (free shipping to the continental US). We’ll have runner up prizes as well, 10 sweet Photojojo camera lens mugs. So what are you waiting for, get on your blog and tell us how great/horrible we are!

Tell Your Friends

Tweet about us by retweeting this message “Chance to win a Nikon D3100 at http://snapsort.com, RT this to enter to win a Canon SD1400! @snapsort”  or join our mailing list and you could win a Canon Powershot SD1400 IS, Photojojo camera lens mugs or one of many Snapsort T-Shirts.
Thanks guys for all your continued support, we can’t wait to hear what you want us to add next.

A full list of rules can be found here