I have a certain list of features I absolutely need, as well as a price range, and I want to plug this information into some sort of online tool that will filter through a comprehensive list of cameras. The nearest thing I've been able to find is the Amazon search, but the features are often mis-tagged.
Does anyone have any ideas?
For high level differences
For more in depth analysis
I'm not a big fan of Snapsort, because they really exaggerate small differences into big ones. This comes out in things like
Much less shutter lag | 104 ms vs 238 ms | 2.3x less delay when taking photos
This is from a comparison from the Pentax K-5 and Nikon D7000. I think the numbers apply to live view, but, probably when using a DSLR, you're not using live view in situations where shutter lag is really important. Shutter lag when using the optical viewfinder is of course negligable for either camera. You might think the D7000 is unusable from the above, but of course that's silly.
That's just an example. Another one is the use of DxOMark scores in a very inflated way. The "image quality" score, is based on a DxO measurement of some technical aspects of image quality, but taken out of context that results in funny claims on snapsort like "23% better image quality". (More on DxOMark scores here.) Or, the comparison of lenses available, which is simply a count of lens models, and says nothing about how those lens lineups actually compare. In short, you can't just take a bunch of data, run it through a computer script, and come out with information.
If you do, you're not really helping people — you're misleading them.
A similar sort of bias comes out in human-produced camera review sites too: since they're driven by visits from people looking to see the differences between cameras, there's a large incentive to play up little differences. Additionally, since the serious reviews feature careful testing and charts and graphs and data, emphasis naturally is slanted towards the differences that can be easily measured and presented in that way — even if they're not the most important for an actual photographer.
Anyway, if you're aware of all that, Snapsort is fine. I'd suggest to instead use the more dry but just as functional Neocamera feature search, or dpreview's similar search.
