Lenshero Review

Lenshero is a website that aims to help photographers decide which lens is right for their needs, camera and budget. The site is not over cluttered and is pretty easy to use. After you put in your camera model and price range, you can either select what kind of lens you are looking to buy, or Lenshero can give you suggestions based on what you already have. They have a ton of different "styles" to choose from if you know what you want. After selecting one, the site gives you a results page of possible lenses in an order they found to be best to worst. The ranking system is based on eight main criteria, so you can see the reasoning behind the ranks, which is really convenient and makes it easy to compare and decide which elements are important to you.
Clicking on a lens brings you to a sort of profile page. Lenshero breaks info down into reviews, compatibility, pros, cons, rated specs and a discussion page.

It would be nice if the results page included an option to directly compare multiple lenses side-by-side, and the review section of the lens pages only has info from B&H, not any other sites.

Also, some of the criteria for ranking lenses can be a little misleading, as with the Canon EF 20mm f/2.8 USM. The visual representations of the criteria are red, orange, yellow and green bars, which work out fine when it's used to rank something like aperture (red= narrower, green= wider). But the bars are also used to show less straightforward elements, such as zoom range and maximum focal range. For example, the 20mm is a fixed lens, so it's maximum focal range is 20mm. On Lenshero, this gives it a red bar, which makes it look like a bad thing, but in a fixed lens, it just is what it is. So less speculative users might glance over the bars, see the red, and move on thinking that this lens is sub-par. Using the bars to answer yes or no questions could also pose the same kind of problem (fisheye: yes= green no=red, but good or bad really depends on if you want fisheye or not).

The suggestion page is a really cool element for users who don't know what they're looking for, or which lens they should invest in next. It offers up a certain style and suggests a particular lens in that style. From there you can see more details about that lens, look into different lenses of that type or take a new suggestion altogether.

This section could use a little more explanation. I know it's giving me these suggestions based on what I already have, but why is the first suggestion for a low-light lens instead of a macro? And why that particular low-light lens as opposed to another? If it only gives me four different suggestions, does that mean that the one lens I do have covers all the other styles?

Overall, Lenshero is a great tool to help you start looking for a new lens, but may not be a one-stop-shop. Once you have your options narrowed down, it's a good idea to look them up on review sites like cnet or dpreview.