Visual boat comparison

I'm not sure if this is interesting or not but thought I'd share anyway ... all are scaled to be relative and lined up on the cockpit.

A proper online tool where you could do this type of comparison would be pretty sweet, a bit like a product comparator which many sites have. Maybe select how you want to align the boats (now, stern, cockpit etc) and provide the ability to drag them around to change order etc etc.

I like this! a lot! Would be great to do this for all intermediate boats - all elite - all beginners etc.
Start with Like: Epic, Fenn, Think, Nelo, Carbonology ...?

Superb idea. Truly

The comparison of cockpit position is very interesting

Would LOVE to see V8pro, V10S, V10, SR, SEI, Evo, Swordfish (all 18-20" intermediate boats) in the same type of pic!

Again, great idea. If anyone with the photoshop skills can do this, I think it would be extremely interesting to see. As hulk said, would be great to have 3 pics with 10+ boats each for beginner, intermediate, advanced hull comparison

Wow, really puts the V11 into perspective.

Once upon a time I used to ask to grab peoples skis and I'd lay them on the grass next to one another and share photos here for comparison.

If someone can provide me clear photographs of all skis (and the length in meters of each ski) I'm happy to put it in a document! and then post it on here.
It shouldnt be too hard. I've some tools to get the scaling right. The trick is to get some good photos.

Here is all the source material thus far (zip file attached) ... have added most of the Epic lineup as reasonable pictures are easy to get a hold of. The scale is 1 pixel = 3.65714mm

Tried to get a hold of some reasonable Fenn images but they are hard to come by ... Stellar should have some good material out there also.

I used Word for the original images but its a bit of a p.i.t.a and would be a lot better in a layout application like Illustrator.

Fantastic comparison. I would love to see the Nelo (520 in particular) added. It and the SES will show a very different approach.

Hi Dave,

I'll have a play with MS Visio in the coming days.
Will be cool to get it out there.

Cheers Mate

Hi Dave,

Love your thinking!

Here`s something very amateurish I did a while back in a similar vein. I wanted to compare the Stellar SEI and the Nelo 560. Not as professional as yours, so looking forward to seeing more of your work!

Owen

Glad to know I'm not the only one that finds this interesting

Have got something very crude online which is hopefully a little better, its quite static and potentially fragile so would be interesting to hear if its useful or not. I'll get some advice from the web creatives at work next week as to what would be involved making it a lot better (select / deselect boats and scale to screen resolution at least). Currently you will need to use your browser zoom.

surfski-comparison.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/

Kiwi, that is really cool. Nice way to show how far forward the paddle sits.

Would be cool if the manufacturers would show a lengthwise cross section. Could get a good idea of seating position and feet height.

Have made the page online a little bit dynamic now ... as time allows I may:
- Add buttons for alignment options (left, right and paddler / cockpit)
- Add buttons for showing / hiding groups of boats by level, manufacturer
- Add key boat metrics in a call-out or something
- Click to toggle between side and top views per boat
- Allow dragging to reorder images

Will be pretty stoked if I can get that all done ... would probably get it a proper domain name also at that point

surfski-comparison.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/

First, kiwi, your tool is AWESOME. props for creating something better than international brands and for profit companies. Your first edition is great and he first of many I hope

2nd, your tool makes me realize what I (minorly) dislike about my stellar SR gen 1. I couldn't describe it before, but your tool shows it to me clearly;
The side walls of an epic around the bucket are higher but have paddle cutouts. The stellar is lower with no cutouts. This leads to more easy swamping of the bucket on my Gen1 SR. I couldn't describe this before but see it in your comparison. I'm fairly ski-brand agnostic, but have observed this unconsciously in the past I guess.

I think personally this is one way your tools has already helped me understand what I already experienced.

Props for a great idea and useful tool. Please expand as time allows!

It would be awesome when we could start adding boats to the website!? Like the Carbonology's the Fenn's the Think's etc?

Indeed At the moment I'm getting the menu / layout sorted so its workable when there are a lot more boats ... adding them in is the easy and fun bit at the end once the workings are sorted.

Will be updating it tonight with some improvements that will make it workable for a large number of boats so stay tuned.

Edit: Updated now, for testing I've got the V10/11/12 and Stellar SES active.

Looking good Dave, I keep going in to sneak peek's. This could be massive. I gather you are somehow scaling the boat images so they are all relative to actual lengths given the images will come from different sources?

Been labouring away for awhile on this, can't paddle because of shoulder op so may as well make myself useful. Great idea KiwiDave and Hulk.

Been as careful as possible to ensure accuracy, all cross-checks ok from his end but may be a stuff-up somewhere. A significant problem has been accessing decent images, reliant on company websites to have vertical and horizontal pics of reasonable resolution. As can be seen from the images not altogether satisfactory. If anyone can find better ones, Fenn in particular, send my way and I'll put them in proportion to the rest.

Boats in brand alpha order, longest first. Had to do a 180 with some boats which were oriented wrong way around (there's no right way, majority face left right, that is stern let and bow right) as a result they're upside down here. Many Thinks were vertical online. Revo's have grey backrounds and unfortunately can't correct - very messy trying to photoshop because of 3D boat shadows. Anyway these better than nought.

Hulk and or Kiwi Dave up to either or both of you to add to your original files where boats located relative to buckets. JPEG's below just snapshots, the real stuff in .png files hopefully attached here depending on site limit. If this doesn't work I'll upload them to my own website and leave a link for them to be accessed that way. It's a start anyway.

No joy, having issues loading editable png files 8MB and 10MB . Sorry chaps off across Australia for a few days, back mid next week see what I can do then.

Great stuff! You guys are doing a terrific job.
It would be helpful to have horizontal lines under each boat to better see rocker profiles. Would also like to see manufacturers add volume measurements to their specs.

@AR_convert: Yep the real boat length is recorded against the image (cropped end to end) and scaled according to the screen width (catering for 6.5m maximum to work the scale factor).

Watto: Yea getting quality images is tricky, hence making it work nice and scale appropriately before loading them all in Thats an awesome collection of boat images you've put together !! Will have to get a hold of them by another means when the time is right to populate everything. Don't worry about scaling them ... all I need now is a good resolution image cropped right to the bow and stern.

@Fath2o: Click on the 'Horizontal Guides' button and they should appear ? Also are on by default. If you can't see them let me know what browser / version you are on.

Have now implemented the below (still only V10/11/12 and SES 2G loaded for testing):
- Stats panel that pops in and out
- Boats can be dragged to change order

Next up will do:
- Make all boats defined by data so no hard coding miles of repetitive HTML ... this may take a while to get sorted
- Click boat to toggle side / top view
- Work in the alignment by cockpit position

Have parked it against a more readable domain for now also: paddlesports.co.nz

Looking really great. Don't forget to save room for some banner ads on your layout. You're putting big effort in to this and it will be very popular. You may as well get some reward for all your efforts.