StatLap vs sprintTimer: photo finish on a phone
Both time a race from a phone camera. One is a single app on one phone; the other is a gun phone, a finish phone and a results site.
sprintTimer has been the photo-finish app on iPhones for years, and if a coach has timed a practice from a phone before, it was probably with it. The comparison is worth making plainly, because a coach who picks StatLap and expected sprintTimer will be annoyed, and the other way round.
What they share
Both use the phone camera as a finish line and time a crossing to the frame the camera was running at. Both keep the picture, which is the thing a stopwatch never did and the thing that settles a place. Neither is a certified fully automatic timing system, and neither claims to be.
Where sprintTimer is better
- One app, one phone, one purchase. Nothing to connect and nothing to sign into.
- A longer track record. Coaches have used it at school meets for a decade and know its quirks.
- A finish photo built as a strip, the way a real photo-finish camera draws it, which reads well when two athletes are a chest apart.
Where StatLap is different
- A second phone at the start hears the gun and starts every clock, so the finish time is from the gun, not from a tap.
- Lanes are detected from where the feet meet the track, so eight lanes come out of one camera when it is high enough.
- Heats, field events, a meet control page, and results that post to a website as the heat runs, then export to MileSplit and Hy-Tek.
- The same phone opens the Film Room, so the run can go straight into slow-mo, angles and the form check.
- Timing is free with no account. A plan pays for publishing and the clip library.
Which one
A coach who wants a photo finish for one lane on one phone, and wants it to just be an app, should look at sprintTimer first. A coach who runs a meet, a practice with heats, or wants the times to land somewhere the athletes and parents can see, is the person StatLap was built for.
A single phone camera runs at 30 or 60 frames a second. Both apps are honest to about a hundredth in good light on a steady tripod, and neither can beat the frame rate of the phone it runs on.
Time your next meet with the phones you already have
Timing, the Film Room and the speed gates are free forever. Publishing results to your own page starts at $59 a month.
Related
StatLap vs Squad Timing: thumb times or camera times
Squad Timing makes hand timing a team fast and tidy. StatLap replaces the thumb with a camera and a gun phone. The difference is the tenth you cannot see.
Read →StatLap vs Ochy: running gait or track events
Ochy scores a runner from a phone clip and shows the trend over weeks. StatLap does that for sprinters and adds the jumps, the hurdles and the timing. Different runners, different tools.
Read →How accurate is phone timing, really?
An honest answer, including where it is worse than a hand time and why that still beats a stopwatch.
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