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Comment by mg | Hacker News Reader

Some years ago, I accidentally got into the camera comparison game.

It started with this Show HN about a weekend project which displays flashdrives on a scatterplot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980

Over time, I made the chart interactive (so one can filter by specs) and extended it to phones, monitors, tablets, 3D-Printers, MP3-Players, SSDs and also cameras:

https://www.productchart.com/cameras/

Not sure how much it can be a replacement for DPReview, which had much more in depth reviews. Open for feedback.

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This is neat! I would love something like this for camera lenses. Seeing everything available for Fujifilm at a glance like your cameras view, that would be so handy.

I'm a bit hesitant to add more product categories at the moment.

All the data is manually researched, which takes about 1h per day, 7 days a week. There are a surprisingly large number of new products and product variations coming out on a constant basis. So a new category would increase the time to research the data further.

I wish there was a Productpedia that would crowdsource structured data about products on a per-category basis. There are isolated instances of this on Wikipedia, i.e. lists of CPUs etc., but not in a queryable form (that I know of). You’d need support for one-off features, probably by using tags. It would be nice if ultimately it gained enough popularity that vendors would self-enter their products specs…

I imagine your site could become something like that if there was a means of opening up contributions.

Hah! It would be amusing to base it off of git and have people submit pull requests for updates or corrections. (I also feel that’s probably a horrible idea, for reasons I am to lazy to think up.)

The hard part about user generated product data would be to handle trustworthyness. That would involve voting for correct and against wrong data, building user trust points etc. Not a small feat.

Thanks. I really liked the ux here and got lost exploring. Flipping from browsing mode to conparison chart table mode between multiple cameras would be great.

Glad you like it.

Have you seen that you can hightlight one camera and then compare it to another?

Oh sweet. Thanks. Didn’t realize highlight could mean that. Change to ”compare” or ”highlight/compare” to make a clearer affordance?

Yes, it is a bit too hidden I guess.

Not sure is labeling the highlight button "Highlight/Compare" is the way to go. Feels a bit cluttered. Maybe "Select"?

The point is: Select… for what? If the user isn’t aware the feature exists, as I wasn’t, why would they click it?

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