Where do you look for advice or insight when in the market for a new lens? Friends? Like-minded photo enthusiasts? Or perhaps this forum? We asked ourselves that question, and came up with: why not build a new lens finder to help start people off in the right direction.
Quick introduction: we are a startup of two photo enthusiasts that have been building a new lens finder from the ground up the past six months. And now the first beta is ready.
To make the finder as comprehensive as possible, we collected all digital SLR cameras ever produced by Canon, Nikon, Sony, Sigma, Olympus, Pentax, and even good old Konica-Minolta. That’s more than a hundred DSLRs ranging from the venerable Nikon D1 to the brand-spanking-new Sony Alpha 99. Once you have found your camera, simply click it, and the finder will show you all the compatible lenses.
The compatible lenses are from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Carl Zeiss, Sigma, Pentax, Tamron and Olympus and represent all the lenses available for the existing DSLRs. In total 566 lenses to be exact. Pretty cool.
I just looked two minutes and found many faults. I clicked on my camera Canon 1DX. Came to the page "Voila! Here are the lenses that are compatible with your Canon 1Dx"
A quick look at that page and I found so many lenses that are NOT compatible with my 1DX. I'm not talking about one or two lenses. More like 25+
When I checked the other 3 Canon cameras that I own. It was exactly the same faults. You did list every lens there is. If they are compatible with the camera or not,
The site is completely borked. Canon EF-S lenses are not usable on FF bodies for starters. The cameras are in no particular order, so finding one is also very difficult.
I am by no means a "pro" photographer. I just like to take pictures for the last couple of years.
As to this site, UGGHHHH!! I have Nikon gear. When I finally found my camera from the jumbled list and sorted the lenses by Nikon, it reminded me of the kids' game "52 Card Pick Up". The lenses were not in any sort of order that I could discern. It took me a couple of minutes to just find the lens I keep on my camera.
It took a couple of minutes more to reach my frustration break point trying to find my other lens and I gave up.
I would never seriously try to use this site. SORRY!!!
I guess this is one of those time where you have to be careful what you wish for. Yikes. Thank you for the (brutally) honest feedback. It is much appreciated and will help us build an even better web app.
I am seeing two trends in the feedback:
1) do not show EF-S lenses as compatible with Canon full frame cameras.
2) the current design schema is creating more confusion than helping guiding the user.
Now regarding the first point, without getting into the technical details you are right that it is not a good idea to mount an EF-S lens on a Canon full frame camera. We have the datapoints separating lenses made for full frame cameras and lenses made for APS-C cameras. We plan to use the datapoints to call out that mounting a lens produced for an APS-C sized body on a full frame camera is possible (except for Canon where the lens mount may hit the mirror), but will produce significant vignetting.
That said, as a full frame shooter would you prefer to not have lenses made for APS-C size bodies display at all if you selected a full frame camera (despite the callout for vignetting)?
For context, on the second point, the cameras are sorted by release date and the lenses alphabetically. That said, would you prefer to have the cameras sorted by brand per default. Or as an alternative, to have no cameras show when you enter the page. And then have the cameras display from the manufacturer you choose? Thoughts?
Similar to the Canon complaints, the Nikon full-frame cameras display DX lenses.
Yes, I know that you could put a little warning that the DX lenses will vignette. But that's not really the point, is it? I mean, it doesn't help to select a "full frame" camera and then see a list of every Nikon lens. I know I can select from every Nikon lens.
If you want to allow users of FF cameras to select DX lenses, have a secondary filter. So, you choose brand > choose camera, and then just put a "FX" and "DX" selector under the "Filter the Lenses" bar so you can easily show or not show those lenses.
Frankly, in order to be useful, you really need to allow more granular control like prime/zoom, focal length ranges, etc. as well as having some data about the lens. It's not super useful to me to see a giant list of lenses with a click to Google results on them. Why? What makes me think of this site when I'm shopping for something? Physical mount compatibility is it? I don't get to know anything about the lens at all?
What makes this site better than, say, the DXOMark database, where I can not only see compatible lenses, but the price, weight, date announced, and fine-tuned granularity over sorting and filtering over the list? Even if the database is much smaller, at least it's useful.
If you can't provide anything useful other than, "will this lens physically mount on this camera" then what audience are you really catering to?
