The Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2016 Situation Room is now LIVE. It is a rolling summary of all the latest deals, a companion to this blog which will continue to post deals as they come out one by one. So if you want to get a summary or if you haven’t checked this blog for a few hours/days, you can quickly get up to speed with the “Situation Room”… See also the How to Make The Most Of This Blog post for more tips…

I just noticed that some of the links in the blue Menu bar at the top of the blog were broken, eg the “Manufacturers” and “Camera Types” menus. They are now fixed. If you spot any still broken, please let me know.

Reason they were broken: when I switched from Typepad to WordPress, I used redirection from the WordPress categories to the old ones to make it easier with the transition for people with bookmarks. Eventually I removed the redirection, but forgot those links were in the Menus.

Posts here are flying fast and furious at this time of the year. Here are some tips to help you make the most of this blog:

+ you can quickly check the most recent five pages of posts using the quick links under the HOME button (top left corner of the blue Menu bar at the top of the page). Page #1 is the home page, Page #2 is the previous, and so forth. Here are the links for convenience: HOME page (aka Page #1) and PAGE #2 and PAGE #3 and PAGE #4 and PAGE #5

+ our customary “Black Friday Deals Situation Room”, a summary of the latest deals organized by camera/product type will go live at some point later on Thursday [I will add a link here once it goes live; UPDATE: link ADDED]

+ the Black Friday Brick and Mortar Ads are summarized by camera/product type and price-checked versus the internet in the Black Friday Ads digest post

+ use the Menu (blue bar at the top of the blog) to quickly navigate various categories and brands of interest, eg Nikon, Canon, etc or DSLR gear or Mirrorless Gear and so forth

+ new posts here are automatically posted on the Twitter account of the camera deals blog @cameradealsblog

+ if the website goes down or has slowdown issues, use the Feedburner RSS feed as a backup. It is hosted by Feedburner/Google, so it works even if the website is down

+ Subscribe or check the Feedburner full-text RSS feed

+ NOTE: if you are subscribed to the Feedburner Email Subscription, it can only send a maximum of 25 posts per day. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday there are often more than 25 posts per day. The Feedburner by Email subscriptions are strictly controlled by Google, webmasters have very little control over them in terms of customization
+ maybe I’ll explore a separate emailing list option, since, since the proliferation of MAP pricing, we don’t have as many deals that only last a few minutes and then are gone; so perhaps email subscriptions could be effective in the post-MAP world

+ for feedback, errors, corrections, omissions, hot deals, etc, please leave a comment or use the online contact form or twitter. If you see a glaring error that doesn’t get corrected even hours later, the chances are I haven’t noticed it, and if I don’t notice it, I can’t correct it 🙂

If you find this blog useful or practical or entertaining, please help fund it by making your upcoming holiday shopping season purchases using the various affiliate links in the various posts and the sidebar here. We have very minimal advertising (just one Adsense ad box, no full page ads, no popups, no pop-unders, no advertorials, no in-text underline ads, no roadblock ads, no surveys, no clickbait “around the web” ads, no bottom of the page ads, no sticky ads, no expanding ads, no RSS feed ads), and most of the funding comes from people using the affiliate links in the posts. Unfortunately 2016 has been a very slow year, so the hope is that the 2016 holiday shopping season will help retroactively fund the whole of 2016. Thank you in advance 🙂

The majority of the published Black Friday ads that offer camera-and-photo related products have been “digested” at the 2016 Black Friday Ads Digest mega-post, including big chain stores like Best Buy, Target and Walmart. A few more stores will be added as they post their ads and also as I check semi-related stores that may have camera-related items (eg action cams or drones in outdoors stores).

This year’s post is organized by camera-type/product-type instead of by retailer, since most of the Black Friday ad scans you can find online (just use any search engine) are broken down by retailer anyway. So this is sort of a value-added re-organization of the offers.

The general trend is similar as previous years [see our 2015 breakdown for cross-reference], a few Canon and Nikon DSLRs are the main iLCs that get advertised along with fewer than before fixed lens P&S cameras. On the other hand, action cameras, drones, and instant film cameras are getting more ad attention. I may do a separate “analysis” post if there’s enough material to write about [most probably it will parallel/similar to our 2015 Grading the Ads].

Our annual Black Friday Ads Digest has began at the main blog! It will be updated multiple times throughout this week until all the relevant Black Friday Ads are digested. The “Latest Update” section will keep you updated on what was added.

This is an older post… As of Sunday at 12:12am ET, most of the Sunday lightning deals are not loaded in the Upcoming section at the Amazon Gold Box, so I can’t do the usual “schedule” post until they get populated. I also have to sleep and such, so I will revisit these at some point on Sunday. In the meantime, you can check them at your leisure at the Amazon Gold Box, or filter them by looking at the Camera and Photo Deals or in general the Electronics Deals.

A new installment in the Price Charts series has gone live, it is the Serious Fixed Lens Cameras. The November 2016 series:

+ 35mm FULL FRAME DIGITAL CAMERAS
+ APS-C DSLRs
+ MIRRORLESS CAMERAS
+ SERIOUS FIXED LENS CAMERAS

You can see the two previous years (mid-November 2015, and December 2014) by going further down in the Price Charts Archives.

A new installment in the Price Charts series has gone live, Mirrorless cameras, by far the longest of the lot so far! Here are all three of them, with Fixed Lens Cameras coming tomorrow:

+ 35mm FULL FRAME DIGITAL CAMERAS
+ APS-C DSLRs
+ MIRRORLESS CAMERAS
+ NEXT: Fixed Lens Cameras

Episode II of the November-2016 Price-Charts series is now up, it is the APS-C DSLRs Price Chart. You can check previous installments and previous years using the Price Charts archives. It will be interesting to see how Holiday Shopping season prices will differ from this snapshot of the prices.

A brand new series has gone live at the main blog, The Rantnoyances (rant + annoyance), pointing out consumer-related issues in camera (and general) shopping. We already had a couple of posts here earlier on (Jet and Triggered) but all the future posts will go to the main blog where it is a better place for longer and more reference-type material. Things fly off the page quickly here, so people don’t always see them, or can’t find them easily as time goes by (even I couldn’t find them quickly!). Rantnoyance #1 is an updated version of the Jet post, now with more details added!

The promised Price Charts series of November 2016 has began with the charts/discussion of 35mm Full Frame Digital Cameras. I won’t spoil the findings here, but it is definitely a different pattern from last year’s comparison. These will continue on a daily basis, with APS-C DSLRs, Mirrorless and finally Fixed-Lens Cameras getting their own posts. As usual please feel free to leave comments/corrections/omissions/etc. If I don’t notice a problem or error, I can’t fix it 🙂

This has now been resolved, categories are working as expected again. Refresh the page if you still see the issue.

If any of you run into this, there’s a simple way to fix it in WordPress, go to Settings, then Permalinks, and change or enter something under “Category base”. Reload the page to make sure it takes effect, and then go back and change it to what it was before (or empty it if it was empty). Then refresh the page again, and it should work as expected.

The original post describing the issue is after the jump…

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It’s that time of the year again, and a new series of “Price Charts” will be posted this week. I have began the groundwork and these will be posted one a day starting with tomorrow. Please feel free to e-yell at me if I don’t 🙂

PS: if you want to get a feel of what to expect, check the Price Charts Archives with two sets of snapshots so far, mid-November 2015 and late-December 2014. The same categories will continue this year since there hasn’t been a dramatic change in the market. The longer and more reference-y posts will now go to the “main blog”, and the quick and time-sensitive posts will be here at the deals blog.

The Windows 10 update was successful…

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This is a meta post, not an actual deal. It is the promised Post Prime-Day Post-Mortem Post, finally posted here 🙂 Please feel free to share your thoughts on Prime Day in the Comments!

Mapping the MAPs
With most of the major manufacturers going the way of MAP pricing, this presented a big opportunity for Rokinon/Samyang to offer a variety of different lenses for different mounts. With most of the bigger names sitting out, they got most of the Lensaholic attention, and getting people’s attention is half the battle for a not-as-well-known lens company.

Of what I spotted, there was the Sigma 70-200mm f2.8 lens, the Sony a6000 two-lens kit late in the day, and a Nikon D3300 bundle that wasn’t sold by Amazon itself, but a Ritz Camera bundle. Among the fixed lens cameras, there was Ricoh Theta, a GoPro early morning bundle that got sold out before I woke up, and an action camera from the Kodak name holders.

The MAP thing, favored by most consumer electronics companies these days, also helped Amazon’s own products get more of the spotlight since more famous products from other manufacturers were not participating.

The Era of the Modest Doorbuster
Amazon has gotten way too big to offer really hot doorbusters. There are simply too many shoppers paying attention. Even on Prime Day, with a smaller percentage of shoppers participating, they still numbered in the many millions. Amazon increased the lifecycle of most lightning deals on Prime Day from the usual 4-hours to 6-hours.

Many of the offers were more of the pragmatic and utilitarian slow-burn kind. Sure, there were still offers that sold out quickly, offers that spent a lot of their lifecycle in Waiting List status, and there were some technical issues for some people earlier on. It was telling that coconut oil sold out faster than a lot of consumer electronics 🙂

Amazon had a bit of a twist this time. In addition to the customary Lightning Deals, they also offered a lot of “Add to Cart” offers where you got the discount by adding to cart, but there were no countdowns and no waiting lists, and the items did not get featured as prominently. Most people are trained to look for the Gold Box and Prime Day deals.

Improvements
Their presentation and organization of things is getting better visually, it’s no longer just a long list of products. They’ve been struggling with this for many years. Some were a bit on the bloated size (unnecessarily giant images on bigger desktop monitors), but overall an improvement over previous years.

The Watching feature is finally getting more useful and featured more prominently, with reliable syncing between the various Amazon platforms, desktop web, mobile web, and apps.

The Problems
For whatever reason, Amazon decided to remove the ability to sort Lightning Deals by time (it used to be the default way) in the main Gold Box. This was great for power users. They instead replaced it by an algorithm hotness/trending type of a sorting mechanism. This is great for people who check in once a day, but why not keep the Date sorting as an option in the menu? They have options to sort by price, which is rather ridiculous when you are looking at thousands of deals of products of every possible kind.

With too many items featured, there was a bigger discoverability problem. You basically had to go through each department kicking the bushes looking for deals. For example, the 20% off book coupon was not mentioned anywhere except for the physical books pages.

With so many different spin-off services, some items become a pain to buy on Amazon. If you are looking for consumable type of items, there are as many as FIVE different separate ways to buy them. Yes, FIVE! The regular Amazon, Subscribe and Save, Prime Pantry, AmazonFresh, and PrimeNOW. Different services, with different prices and quantities at each one.

While they offered a no-strings-attached free 30-day trial for non-members, whenever you have an event where some people are not allowed to participate, it can consciously and/or subconsciously negatively influence the opinions of non-participants towards the service.

Meta Meta
Even though I was as productive as I could be covering Prime Day (absent cloning and/or army of minions), I still missed posting a number of good tech offers early in the day. A number of which got posted in the night wave when the camera and photo schedule madness finally slowed down.

There were fewer blog errors and typos and confusions than I would have expected for such a chaotic event. Or I didn’t notice them 🙂 The biggest goof was perhaps me accidentally starting a Kindle Unlimited subscription while trying to copy the url 🙂

The high-speed scrolling feature of the mouse proved to be the most useful technological thing in covering this. It was the best way to traverse the giant Situation Room post.

Speaking of which, according to WordPress, I revised that post 203 times 🙂

UPDATE: Prime Day is almost over but these tips are “reusable/recyclable” for both regular Lightning Deals and also the Holiday Shopping season…

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This experiment ended successfully…

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I just added a WordPress “Recent Comments” widget in the Sidebar of this blog so you can check the latest comments/opinions/corrections posted here.

I don’t want to add the more fancy third-party commenting systems since they add overhead and have their own tracking cookies and audience gathering data and such (which is probably why they are free for everyone to use).

I still have to figure out how to integrate the comment counter on the individual blog posts. The standard way of doing it with the Genesis theme would add a line to every single post and the posts need to get shorter (not longer) to make it easier for people skim and scan. In other words, I have to dive inside the Genesis theme to figure out how to do this and other theme-related things (or switch to a different theme). All options take brain-power and time, and I have neither 🙂

We have an opinion poll for you. Do you find the Fry’s Electronics deal posts useful? Most of their deals now are going through their email newsletters instead of having an “open source” weekly ad with various offers. They only have a small number of regional brick and mortar stores, so that reduces the percentage of our readers who have access to the stores. Also as one of regular readers pointed out a few days ago, they also mark as “online” offers that are “buy online pickup in-store”, which does not help the majority of our readers since Fry’s stores are only in a few cities/states.

If you have any answers that don’t fit the binary Yes/No, please leave a blog-comment or use the online contact form. The blog-comments are posted on the blog (unless you write in the comment “don’t publish it” or something along those lines – it has be clear enough for birdbrain me to understand it :)). Anything that is sent via email or the contact form is considered private (unless you indicate otherwise).

I am not quite sure how to post these updates, since lack of a post can either mean “no deal” or it could mean I didn’t get around to posting it, so this is a catch-all no-op type of a post, the Amazon Gold Box Lightning Deals continue to be very light compared to the Holiday Shopping season, both in terms of camera-and-photo items and overall. I will continue to monitor the situation. We are now in the Super Bowl to Valentines season, so the focus is more on salsa and bracelets 🙂

We have a brand new limited time promotion for you! Buy One Holiday Wish, Get 1000 Holiday Wishes FREE! Which is our clumsy way of saying Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Kwanza, Happy Hannukah, Happy Festivus, Season Greetings, Happy Saturnalia, FSM Day, and all the other holidays you celebrate from January 1st until December 31st every year!

If you are following the updates intermittently or want to see a summary of the latest deals during the holiday shopping season, we have now added Quick Jump Links to the Camera Deals Situation Room so you can quickly jump to your product categories of potential interest without having to page-down and page-down. This was added partially because that post has gotten longer and longer.

The latest deals summary aka the Holiday Shopping Season Situation Room has been updated with new offers and at the same time, expired offers have been removed (I think I got them all, but the bigger it gets, the higher the chances of missing something). Expired offers are deleted from the post in order to keep readable and editable.

The Latest Deals summary, aka the Holiday Shopping Season Situation Room at the main blog has now been updated, with the expired Cyber Monday deals removed (I hope I caught them all), and today’s new offers added. The summary is intended to be an executive summary, not include every single offer mentioned here. I am trying hard to keep that summary post simple and readable. In previous years, by December 31st, it would be almost as long as War and Peace 😉

Posts are flying fast and furious here during the holidays. If you want to quickly check a summary of the currently available offers, check the Holiday Deals Situation Room. It will keep going until the end of the year.

Alternately you can quickly check all recent posts here by using the Page links under the HOME button in the leftmost spot in the menu page. It has direct links to Pages #1 through #5. Open in new tab/window if you like, and peruse at your leisure.

There’s also the free full-text RSS feed, which also serves as a backup in case the website goes down (it is hosted by Feedburner, so it stays up even if this website is down).

One more note, a number of the offers are either for Cyber Monday specifically or were planned to expire at the end of day on Cyber Monday.

During the Black Friday, Cyber Monday and extended Holiday shopping period, deals (and posts here) fly at a much faster pace than usual. If you want an executive summary of the latest deals or if you are checking in intermittently, you can find some of the best deals currently available at the Holiday Deals Situation Room. Every year I vow to keep it simple and short, and every year it ends up becoming a big sprawl 🙂

A link to the new Situation Room has been added to the Sidebar of both this and the main blog under the “Black Friday Coverage” segment (which will change to Cyber Monday and Holiday Shopping eventually).

Another way to catch up with the latest updates here is to use the shortcut links under the “HOME” tab of the main menu here. They quickly take you to Pages #2 through #5 (eg open in background tab/window and digest them at your pace).

You can also catch up using the full-text RSS feed which also serves as a backup site in case the actual website goes down. The RSS feed is hosted by Feedburner, so it doesn’t depend on the website being up.

A quick note, I increased the number of posts shown on the front page of the blog to keep up with the increased volume of Black Friday postings and also increased the number of items to be shown in the RSS feed as we have been doing 20+ per day the last few days (and it’s only gonna get crazier). If any of these cause any issues technical or otherwise, please let me know in the comments or using the online contact form.

The Black Friday Ad digest (going through them and pointing out the camera and photo related items) continues at the mega-post at the main blog with even more additions. There are still more retailers that are being added as we speak. So far the Nikon D3300 and the Canon D-Rebel T5 are appearing in many of the ads, and in our MAP-controlled world, they have the same prices everywhere.