Best way to look for cels

[ssvegito04]

Hey everyone,
I have been using SMJ to look for cels, but every now and then I see cels pop up that don't appear on the SMJ search engine.
Can anyone tell me the best tactics to find cels on YJ? I just don't want to miss out, lol

[JWR]

I don't use SMJ but I would expect if you have the time that you should be able to search "Cels All Series" every so often to see what out there.

[ReiTheJelly]

Find the name of the show you like (in Japanese) and search for it directly on Yahoo!Japan or Mbok in their cel categories. This won't help you if the seller has misspelled the name of the series, but it will help you find 99% of auctions. Here is the Cel category for Y!J.

[Keropi]

I found the most thorough and extremely time consuming way of trying not to miss anything is to:

Look up the anime on Anime News Network Encyclopedia:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php

1. Use the Japanese and English titles of the anime and search for items on YJ under those names. If very little or nothing comes up under the English title or alternate Japanese spellings stop searching with it.

2. Use the anime titles in combination with cel (セル画) the title.

3. Search the general cel category all by itself by using: セル画

4. Search the seller's auctions of sellers who have sold cels from that series before. It's a lot easier to do this every day if the seller hardly sells anything or doesn't sell much. If they sell a lot and often the search becomes repetitive and time consuming to do every day.

#3 and #4 will help in case the auction description describes an auction in such a way that the cel will not show up in the first two searches. Sometimes if the Japanese words run together the auction will not show up in a search. Checking by seller is good because sometimes a seller describes a cel in a way that it will not show up in the other searches. This doesn't happen very often though. Usually they know what words to use so it will show up properly. Sometimes a seller won't even use "cel" in the description so you'd have to catch the auction through searches of the title of the anime and variations in its spelling. Keep an eye out for alternate spellings of the anime title for searches that you are not using.

But yeah, like ReiTheJelly said the great majority of the time the cel will show up just from doing a general cel セル画 search.

And remember to search YJ going from the highest number page to the lowest (particularly on the general cel search where there are a lot of pages). If you go from low to high numbered page, sometimes an auction will fall off the page before you can get to it. Keep an eye on the number of items in the search in the general cel search because sometimes the pages won't load properly. If the number of items/pages drops all of a sudden when moving to a new page, reload the page so the item/page number goes back to what it was before. I've missed items because of the non-fully loading pages thing. I didn't notice that they hadn't fully loaded.

[ssvegito04]

Thanks to everyone who replied.
Looks like the seller didn't add the word 'cel' to their discription.
All good though, thanks to your suggestions I have found many ways to double and triple check.

Thanks again

[usagi]

You can search in English and Japanese on Rinkya's search engine:
http://www.rinkya.com/new/en/category-0

Searching directly in Japanese and then looking directly at the category help.

We'll also be coming out with a new alert feature, where you can enter in what you are looking for and we'll email you when it pops up on Yahoo Japan!

Thanks!
Rinkya

[jcaliff]

It also can help to know if a Japanese title has a common Japanese abbreviation. I've seen Legend of Galactic Heroes cels listed with the title "gineiden" (銀英伝) from the Japanese title Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (銀河英雄伝説). For Nintama Rantaro (忍たま乱太郎) I just search for "nintama" (忍たま) because a surprising amout of times they don't bother with the second half of the title. It's not common, but it happens.

I like how they've set it up now so that when you search for a phrase from the Yahoo JP Auction page, it not only shows a list of items, but also in the upper left corner shows number of items under various catagories. So, for example, when I search "Nintama" I can click on the Anima Manga Goods catagory, and then it will show subcatagories under that. I can choose to view individual catagories that aren't cosplay goods (Nintama has a lot of cosplay junk). Cels and drawings can hide under other catagories.

I also periodically check "unknown" title cels, just to see what the sellers can't identify. I do this by going into the anime cels main catagory and then searching for the phrase "unknown" (不明) in all cels.

[Animechaos]

Our search you can use English or Japanese, even do raw searches.

Here is a little example searching for "エヴァンゲリオン セル画" (Evangelion cel)

http://smjsearch.com/cgi-bin/lc.cgi?m=y ... BBA5EBB2E8

-Nick

[AerynAerie]

We'll also be coming out with a new alert feature, where you can enter in what you are looking for and we'll email you when it pops up on Yahoo Japan!
Thanks!
Rinkya

Oh no, that feature might be even more disastrous for my wallet!