How to choose snowboard boots
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[1] Toe Part
When you try boots on, make sure that you can move your toe up and down, and also put it on/off without any difficulty. If Boots are too loose, it causes injury from the slides within the boots and hard to transfer power to the board.
[2] Heel Part
You can lift your heel in pretty much every boot, but try to find the one that you can lift it the least. It is expected that your heel does not float when you bend forward. It gets you unstable and hard to control the board. If you are a freestyle rider, heel part is probably the most important element of all.
[3] Hardness of Boots
Usually, softer boots are desirable because of the stubbornness of boots especially at turning. But again, too soft boots are not good either since it becomes the cause of injury when you fail to trick or land.
Boot Types
Boots are consisted of outer and inner. You should put an emphasis on inner more since it directly touchs your foot.
Inner
Lace Type: This type enable you to tighten your boots by pulling a lace. Since you can tighten it apart from outer, it fits better.
Laceless Type: This literally does not have a lace. It means the boot only has a lace or a wire on its outer. It is rightfully easy to take off laceless-type boots. Almost all of rental boots are categorized as this type.
Sirmo-inner Type: It changes its shape to fit your feet by the heat. Some of them are actually warmed up by heaters. The others are heated by the body temperature. It fits better than any other inner because you pretty much can customize your inner.
Pomp-up type : Inner of boots gets air from a pomp to adjust the fitting. It reduces shocks to your feet. Quite a lot of recent model boots have cushions.
Outer
Shoe-lace Type: This is a traditionall style. Just like a normal sneaker, you tie up the lace by your hand. It requires a lot more power as compared to those cutting edge types explained below.
BOA: BOA is the system that you can tie up your boots by turning the dial that is put on the top of the wire. Shortage of this type could be that you cannot adjust the tightness of your boots with BOA since every part is equally tied up. But it obviously needs much less power and faster to put on and off than show-lace type.
Speed Zone Lacing: In order to tie your boots easily using less power, Speed Zone Lacing was discovered. The wire is already set through dorsum part. All you need to do is to pull out the wire and boots get tighten. Difference from BOA is that most of Speed Zone Lacing type have seperate wires at dorsum and lower part of shin.