Buying prime lenses on eBay

[wilhelmson]

I have been buying a couple of Canon FD prime lenses on eBay recently. Feeling that the eBay search facility was somewhat limited, and me being a proper code monkey and all that I felt I had to build a website specifically to help me with finding these lenses. It's definitely nothing fancy, and there is probably some website I don't know about out there that does this much better, and I'm not even sure how it will hold up if more than one person is using it to be honest. ;-)

Anyway, I am not an eBay affiliate and there are no ads on the site, so I hope it's ok to post the link to it - if not I'm sure someone will let me know. ;-)

Hopefully it can help someone to find a nice prime for their GH1:

http://primes.decentattempt.com

[Summy]

I have been hunting primes for a while now and this definitely takes some of the hassle away, props for making an enthusiasts life a little easier.

[Kevin I]

Very nice tool. Thanks for making and sharing it!

[Ben_B]

Great now they're gonna go even faster before I can scrape together funds to get my greasy mits on them. Nice tool.

[wilhelmson]

Thanks for the kind words. Inevitably a few bugs have already been found that I wasn't even aware of, so it's good to get it out into the wild to find and fix those things. The engine that identifies the primes also needs some polishing so we'll see if I get some time to do that.

[JB_frenchy]

great and useful tool, thank you.
Is it possible to add more country fields, like for example... uh, france? that would be great, even it's true the ebay french market isn't as big as yours, people just keep lens in their cellar, i guess...

[chriscurl]

Thanks for this, fantastic!

[menace3000]

looks great, hmmm, if you add countries, could you add Germany?
Good work!

[xbourque]

Maybe you should consider 4/3rd and u4/3rd mounts in your list as well?

[wilhelmson]

I've added France and Germany by popular request.

Agree that 4/3 and u4/3 should be in the list. They should actually appear as soon as the eBay crawler finds such a lens for the first time, so either this hasn't happened yet (unlikely?) or they currently end up in the "unknown" category... I'll have a look, it is very possible that I need to do some adjustments.

[Dalton Boettcher]

Wow. Sweet app/site/code-monkey creation! Very helpful. Thanks wilhelmson!

[menace3000]

Thank you for adding Germany. Great work!

[PhilD]

What about Canada, eh?

[timbook2]

nice work !! much appreciated :thumbup:

[JB_frenchy]

France thank you very much.

[wilhelmson]

Thanks everyone! I've added Canada now. There was also an issue where the start page went blank which I hope should be fixed...

[Rolly]

Nice tool, Thanks!

[AdrianF]

Bookmarked, nice job and great that it can be country specific. Cheers

[Dalton Boettcher]

I'm getting a "500 Server Error" :( Dang this was really useful. Anyone else getting the error?

[wilhelmson]

The server was having a bad day, or at least a bad couple of hours, but it looks like it is behaving now. Has it started working for you again, Dalton?

[SonicStates]

That's a great site. I need to expand the lens collection for a short coming up which is going to need a few fast primes so thanks! It's going to help.

[Dalton Boettcher]

The server was having a bad day, or at least a bad couple of hours, but it looks like it is behaving now. Has it started working for you again, Dalton?
Yep! Thanks again!! :beer:

[J Davis]

veryuseful.downrightsolidattempt
:)

[Kholi]

Awesome app!

Can zeiss contax/yashica be added?

[wilhelmson]

Thanks again for all the nice comments. I've just now added some logic to identify four thirds lenses and contax yashica ones, but as there is some lag in my ebay crawler it may well take up to a couple of days until it has updated the ones that are currently "unknown".

Really appreciate all your feedback!

[PhilD]

Great little web app

[commanderspike]

Thank you for the app. It's great.

As a web developer, I am curious how you put it together. Is there an eBay API?

[wilhelmson]

Yep, the API is quite extensive: http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/

You need to register first, but then you can use regular HTTP requests and get XML back.

[bimdas]

bookmarked. can you please add australia to the list.

[wilhelmson]

Out travelling at the moment but will add Australia asap.