Welcome to the Camera Dome :)
Just in time to be fashionably late for the Oscars, we got an award! This blog is ranked #7 among the “Camera Gear Blogs” at Feedspot. This is the digital version of the award below. I don’t think a hardware version is coming in the mail, but it won’t stop me from checking the mail daily 🙂
If you find this chaotic website useful, tell your friends on the interwebs, and on the street and in the social media and in the forums and in AR/VR too! The more the merrier! We need moar people! You can give them the website link. We also have a free full-text RSS feed. Also compare the amount of advertising you see on a typical website with this!
These events ended but you can find them archived on YouTube if interested (just search for the relevant keywords, Nokia MWC 2018, etc)…
And we are back with the final installment in the mid-February 2018 price charts series, it is the RAWsumers, the serious fixed lens cameras with RAW out of the box, here’s the post: Fixed Lens Cameras Price Chart!
+ 35mm Full Frame Price Chart
+ APS-C DSLRs Price Chart
+ Mirrorless Price Chart
+ Fixed Lens Cameras Price Chart
This is by far the largest and more complicated of the Price Charts posts, the mirrorless cameras. There are so many of them the main chart is split in two. A total of four charts are available and the price-checking produced many mirrorless deals posts.
So without any further ado, here it is, the mid-February 2018 Mirrorless Price Chart…
+ 35mm Full Frame Price Chart
+ APS-C DSLRs Price Chart
+ Mirrorless Price Chart
+ Fixed Lens Cameras Price Chart (coming up)
We continue our mid-February Price Charts series with the publication of the APS-C DSLRs Price Chart. This one did not trigger as many deal posts as did the Full Frame burst mode of posts the previous two days.
If everything goes according to plan, we’ll continue posting one of these per day, in the order they are mentioned below:
+ 35mm Full Frame Price Chart
+ APS-C DSLRs Price Chart
+ Mirrorless Price Chart (coming up)
+ Fixed Lens Cameras Price Chart (coming up)
The avalanche of 35mm full frame deals is over! The Full Frame Price Checking has been completed, and not only that, but Part #1 of our February 2018 Price Chart series is complete! You can now read it, it is the Episode I: The Full Frame Discounting Menace, directed by Chewbacca and a PORG 🙂
Thanks to our readers for the alerts! Two more trade shows have been added to the Trade Show Calendar, it is the “The Photography Show” in Birmingham in February, and now launching a US version as well, in May in Los Angeles!
CES 2018 is here, and with it we had the first wave of official new product announcements. So the time was right today to launch our New Cameras and Lenses of 2018 Tracker. As with the previous installments, we only track serious/interesting cameras, we no longer chase every single P&S camera or $50 lens clone 🙂
For reference, these are the trackers for the previous years:
+ the New Cameras of 2017
+ the New Cameras of 2016
+ the New Cameras of 2015
This blog is like a tourist spot, the holiday season helps fund the rest of the year! If you find this useful, please seriously consider making your online holiday through our various affiliate links in the individual blog-posts, or the sidebar or the Shop and Support page which lists all the annoying advertising methods we avoid here. We have so few ads even the spambot comments are saying I need to add more ads 🙂
Anything you buy using those links helps, big or small. You don’t have to buy the item shown or linked to. You can buy something from a competing manufacturer, or something totally different. Even ladybugs 🙂
You can also help support this adventure without shopping
+ tell your friends online, in social media, in the forums, and so forth!
+ tell your friends offline too!
+ subscribe to the free full-text RSS feed
We have a website update! I just updated the Trade Show Calendar, adding the 2018 calendar year dates, with a lot of movements on the schedule, some a few days and some jumping around by months. And starting with 2019, Photokina will be happening in the month of May. But we are also getting the last September Photokina in September 2018.
I just finished a much needed pruning and updating of the Stock Status Tracker. The Sony a7r III has been added as it was expected to be out about this time of the year. But that and the Nikon D850 are not in-stock at the moment.
Removed from the Tracker were a handful of cameras that had been steadily in-stock and didn’t have price movements: Canon 6D II, Nikon D7500, Panasonic GH5, Fuji X-E3 and GFX-50S. The Fuji X100F managed to survive another round of “The Purge” 🙂
If there are any other upcoming hard to find cameras or lenses you want me to add to the tracker, please leave a comment or use the online contact form. Your feedback greatly decides on what’s included!
After a 16 hour detox we are baaaaack with a Black Friday – Cyber Monday post-mortem post before we return to our regularly scheduled programming.
We posted a record-breaking 272 individual deal posts here during the last seven days (ending Cyber Monday night)! The high was 50 on Thanksgiving Day. It averages to around 39 posts per day for the last seven days. This was made possible because I fell behind on updating the “Situation Room” deals summary that I used to do in previous years. Then the waves and waves of deals hit and I simply didn’t have time to post all the new deals, let alone maintain the rolling summary of the latest deals. So the Situation Room was not updated since before Thanksgiving Day. And that allowed for a lot more individual deal-posts to be posted.
So what do you think for next year’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday coverage? Do you prefer the way of this year with even more individual deal posts without a rolling summary? Or the other way around? Please leave a comment or use the online contact form to opine!
One developing item is how to deal with the daily Amazon Gold Box lightning deals. During the Black-Cyber week, they reduced the “visibility window” from the usual 20+ hours to just 4. When I checked during lunch today (yes, I’m even blog-working during lunch) the visibility window was seven hours. So before I make any further decisions, I’ll wait for a couple of days to see where things settle.
In the next few hours I will go through the various posts and try to update / (ENDED) any of the expired offers, but given the volume and chaos, there are reasonable chances I may miss some of the expired deals or expire some still running deals.
This is also a good time for general purpose blog-related feedback! Please leave a comment or use the online contact form to opine!
The latest WordPress Search engine is actually pretty good! So much so that I added it to the header of the blog, on the right opposite the website name. To balance it visually, I added a tagline below the name. Thanks to the responsiveness of the theme, it sticks around no matter how small you make the window! If you experience any problems with it, please leave a comment or use the online contact form.
It looks like this is the new way Amazon is doing teasers of lightning deals. Previously they gave us a 20+ hour heads-up in the Gold Box. Now the maximum future visibility we all have is four hours. More specifically four hours from the top of the hour, so it’s somewhere between 3-4 hours depending on when you check.
This means I can no longer do the nightly schedule posts because I can only “see” 3-4 hours ahead instead of 20+ hours.
Instead, I started using a brand new Gold Box tag (Bookmark This if you like; there’s also a link to it in the Blog Sidebar). I am using this blog tag to mark all the posts that talk about Amazon Lightning Deals, so you when you string them all together, you see the latest lightning deal posts.
Another wave of Black Friday deals will go live on Friday starting at 12:01am eastern! So get ready 🙂 Here are some tips to make the most of this:
+ use the blue menu bar at the top to quickly check if you are interested in products from a particular Manufacturer or Camera Mount or Camera Type (DSLR, mirrorless, superzoom, etc)
+ if you want to catch up to all the posts you may have missed, under the “HOME” button there are baked-in links to the first five pages of this blog. You can open them in background tabs/windows and skim/scan them all
+ subscribe to the Full-Text RSS Feed (FREE)
+ if the website crashes or slows down and such, use the Feedburner RSS feed link above as a backup. It is hosted separately by Feedburner, so it’s not affected by what happens to the website
+ I was supposed to be updating the “Situation Room” in parallel but there are so many things to sift and post, I just haven’t found time to do yet
+ UPDATE: I forgot there was a Search Box on the website – I brought it up higher in the Sidebar so it should be above the fold on Desktops and Some Laptops. It’s below the Black Friday links.
Good news bargain hunters! Starting at 12:01am eastern on Thursday (9pm pacific on Wednesday) another burst of deals is going to go live including the previously teased Olympus Black Friday sales along with manufacturer-initiated price-matches of Black Friday Ads, and much and more! That’s about four hours from this post, so decaf is no allowed 🙂
This blog is like a tourist spot, the holiday season helps fund the rest of the year! If you find this useful, please seriously consider making your online holiday through our various affiliate links in the individual blog-posts, or the sidebar or the Shop and Support page which lists all the annoying advertising methods we avoid here. We have so few ads even the spambot comments are saying I need to add more ads 🙂
Anything you buy using those links helps, big or small. You don’t have to buy the item shown or linked to. You can buy something from a competing manufacturer, or something totally different. Even ladybugs 🙂
You can also help support this adventure without shopping:
+ tell your friends online, in social media, in the forums, and so forth!
+ tell your friends offline too!
+ subscribe to the free full-text RSS feed
This blog is like a tourist spot, the holiday season helps fund the rest of the year! If you find this useful, please seriously consider making your online holiday through our various affiliate links in the individual blog-posts, or the sidebar or the Shop and Support page which lists all the annoying advertising methods we avoid here. We have so few ads even the spambot comments are saying I need to add more ads 🙂
Anything you buy using those links helps, big or small. You don’t have to buy the item shown or linked to. You can buy something from a competing manufacturer, or something totally different. Even ladybugs 🙂
You can also help support this adventure without shopping:
+ tell your friends online, in social media, in the forums, and so forth!
+ tell your friends offline too!
+ subscribe to the free full-text RSS feed
This is a heads up! Going live on Sunday 11/19/17 at 12:01am (or shortly thereafter) are going to be new instant savings from Canon, Nikon, Sony, Sigma and Ricoh! More details later on as I assemble the various posts.
Of all the times in the year, WordPress decided to go bonkers a week before Black Friday. There are issues with the current WordPress theme, so I switched back to the old one until they get sorted out! That will teach me not to update to a new version of a theme or WordPress the moment it appears 🙂
If you have any problems accessing the website, please leave a comment here or use the online contact form.
As a backup, you can use the Feedburner RSS feed which is not dependent on the theme and it is hosted separately by Feedburner.
You can also check the latest deals summary at the Black Friday 2017 Situation Room – this is a separate WordPress installation with a different web hosting company. It’s the poor blogger equivalent of a fault tolerant system 🙂
PRO WORDPRESS TIP: always have at least one backup WordPress theme in cases like this. Preferably a theme from a different company, so if, for example, the WordPress default themes go down in flames, you can go back to something that doesn’t depend on them, in our case it’s a Genesis theme.
More updates we did to the Black Friday Ads Digest, with new ads coming out from DJI, Gamestop, Groupon, and more! The DJI store will be offering additional free accessories with purchase. I do not know if retailers / authorized dealers are planning to match or beat them with their own freebies. We will find out soon enough, Black Friday is eight days away 🙂
The “Quick Jump Links” are back in our on-going Black Friday 2017 Camera & Photo Situation Room. As the post grows longer and longer, these help in quickly jumping to the main areas of interest. The last one (Accessories) takes you quickly to the bottom, while the other links are self-explanatory. I am keeping Lenses as one mega category because a lot of sales are a mix of DSLR and mirrorless lenses.
Here’s a screenshot crop of this new section over there:
Another buffet of BF ads has been digested in our Black Friday Ads Digest of 2017 with another handful of stores including Overstock, Microsoft and more. The new additions have been integrated to the various categories as usual. The biggest addition with this group was a mystery GoPRO HERO5 bundle at Overstock with lots of accessories but no price given 🙁
Here’s an example of the breakdown by category. As you can see, by grouping them together, the Nikon D3400 two lens kit that is offered at many places only appears once in the list, making it easier to skim and scan:
As usual, most of these will be price-matched by the internet sellers by (or often before) the actual Black Friday.
Black Friday is less than 12 days away, so, as usual, we have just launched our Black Friday 2017 Situation Room. It will serve as an executive summary for the latest deals.
The latest deals as they happen will continue to be posted here as usual. You can also follow the action using our free full-text RSS feed.
Task #1 of this weekend’s blog plan has been completed [the Price charts series].
As of 10:44pm ET, Task #2 has been completed: we digested the Black Friday ads that came out this week. You can find them all integrated into the Black Friday Ads digest.
DIGESTED TONIGHT
+ Best Buy
+ HP, Big Lots, NewEgg
+ Jet, Dollar General
+ Macy’s and Sam’s Club
+ Meijer and BJ’s
+ CVS and Walgreens
+ Sears and K-Mart
+ Staples and Office Depot/MAX
+ Walmart
HOW TO USE THE DIGEST
The new offers found in those ads will be integrated into the Black Friday Ads digest. Because of MAP, many offers are similar or the same across retailers.
It is faster to read a single line that shows every retailer offering the same deal, rather than having half a dozen separate entries for the same thing under each retailer. Here’s an example of the space-saving benefits:
Mission accomplished! The November 2017 Camera Price Charts series is now complete! I just published the last of the four installments, the Fixed Lens Cameras Price Chart, aka the RAWsumers. This is a segment whose doom was foretold many times, yet they are alive and kicking against all odds. Rah-rah-rah-rah 🙂
+ 35mm Full Frame Cameras
+ APS-C DSLRs
+ Mirrorless Cameras
+ Fixed Lens Cameras
Just like the Cylons (ha!), we have a plan! A plan for the Black Friday season which is upon us already – just two weeks away from Black Friday.
This year we are taking more of a sequential approach. Here is the Plan, approved by #6:
Mirrorless is where most of the action is in terms of new camera gear development and that’s why we have a massive new Mirrorless Price Charts installment with a total of four charts! this is too big to read on mobile, it needs a big screen!
+ 35mm Full Frame Cameras
+ APS-C DSLRs
+ Mirrorless Cameras
+ Fixed Lens Cameras (COMING UP)
We have completed Episode II of the 2017 Camera Price Charts series with the APS-C DSLRs! Two down, and two to go. The plan is to have one per day, so Mirrorless should be out on Thursday and Fixed Lens Cameras on Friday.
+ 35mm Full Frame Cameras
+ APS-C DSLRs
+ Mirrorless Cameras (COMING UP)
+ Fixed Lens Cameras (COMING UP)
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