tbarribeau

Personally, I'm not a fan. I think many of the deals are utterly crap (hence why we're doing this), and it's taken one of the holidays where you don't need to buy anything that you're not going to eat, and transformed it into another excuse for shopping.

Oh hey, it's a reddit celebrity!

We've done a bit of work on lenses, but those are mostly broad based lens recommendations for people to pick up with their new cameras. And there is a binoculars recommendation. None of those are super scientific — with lenses especially it's a category where there are a lot of people doing really excellent work already, so there's not as much of a need for us to spend all day looking at Gretag Macbeth color charts, or things like that.

But if you want to delve into the technical side of camera lenses, the best places are probably DxOMark's lens reviews, and the LensRentals Blog. The latter especially is fascinating stuff, and Roger Cicala digs up some really interesting info. His recent piece on "in spec" lenses in particular was intriguing.

That was one of the big reasons we went with the Jetstream — dries fast and is good for lefties.

Hey, glad you liked the piece! That one was a ton of fun to put together!

On the longevity front, out of the ones that I've reviewed, I gotta say probably the Zeroll ice cream scoop. My parents still have theirs, which is at least three decades old at this point—and apparently there are some still in use from the 1940s. As long as you don't put it in the dishwasher, it'll last forever.