The Pick of the Crop

A few weeks ago, I was at a Ritz camera store in some mall. I was thinking of getting a new digital camera and wanted to see the cameras in person. Before I had bought my first digital camera, I read reviews on line. There were two reasons for this. First, I wanted to see which cameras were being recommended. Second, I wanted to see what was important when buying a digital camera. I knew, in the back of my head, that I wouldn't really get a feel for what I wanted in a camera until I owned one, and so likely, my first choice might not be that good.

I would later learn that there's about three levels of cameras you can pick from. There are the professional digital cameras. These are behemoths of a camera that resemble their film breathern in size, even as they use CCDs to capture light, and were more becoming more computer than camera. Both the size (huge) and the price (huge) made these a no-go in my book.

Then, there are the cameras with some decent manual and automatic features. These cameras are also usually a little bulkier though small compared to the basic models Canon and Nikon used to sell. Many of these use rechargable alkalines to power them.

Typically, the better you get at photography, the more control you want. You want to focus, set the aperture (how wide the "opening" should be) which also controls depth of field (how much of what you see is in focus--food photography, for example, often creates narrow depths of field so part of the dish is in focus, and parts are blurry, to heighten the focused part), and the shutter speed (which affects how much light the picture gets).

The early automatic cameras would let you control one, while it controlled the other. For example, if you want to control depth of field, you would set it to aperture priority. The camera would figure out how long to keep the shutter open to capture the image. The longer the shutter is open, the more likely the picture will blur, especially if you are holding the camera (this is why people get tripods). On the other hand, if you're interested in high speed photography, you'll want to control the shutter speed, because the target (say a running athlete) will be moving quickly, and you'll want to freeze the motion with a high shutter speed. The camera will then select the aperture.

By the 1980s, the next big innovation was in: auto-focus. The cameras from the 70s that didn't require focusing effectively focused at "infinity", which meant that your subject had to be like ten feet away if they were going to be in focus. Close-ups were no good. Some Polaroid cameras used sonar to detect distance.

However, Canon, Nikon, and other cameras added auto-focus. Somehow, they could adjust the focus quickly enough for people not to have to focus manually. Usually, the focused on what the center of the camera was aimed at. Needless to say, these cameras became popular. If there's one thing that was painful for amateurs, it was focusing in a mini-viewfinder.

But the real revolution came with digital cameras. Indeed, digital cameras wouldn't have been popular if the personal computer also hadn't dropped in price. The digital camera offered one big advantage. It recorded picture on a memory card. If you were willing to pay, you could get a card that could hold a thousand pictures, nearly 50 rolls of film. Even a smallish card could often hold 120 pictures, which is about 6 rolls. And once you dumped the pix on your home computer, you could reuse the card over and over again. No more film purchases. No more going to the store to develop and print the film. This allowed folks who didn't even take pictures to take pictures.

As cameras became more automated, more people could use it. Even professional photographers, especially photojournalists or sports photographers, like the auto focus features.

Once you get past the high end cameras, you can divide the digital cameras into "full" featured (i.e., some manual control) cameras and ultra-compact cameras with fewer features. Although I like control and everything, carrying a big camera is too painful. I'd sacrifice features just to have a small camera I can carry everywhere.
And this is what's informed my decision.

As I've now picked several cameras, there are a few features I like and want. First, I'd like to have a large display screens. Fortunately, cameras have been getting larger and larger view screens. What used to be about an inch and a half are now up to 3 inches square. People are using view screens to preview their photos for friends. You have to recall, in the old days, that people had to wait until the photos were developed and printed to begin to share their photos. These days, merely seconds after taking the picture, you can show your friends (nearby) on the camera itself.

I also want cameras to remember my flash settings, which is usually set to no flash. However, Canons are annoying. Power them down, and they go back to auto-flash. After all, you're an idiot who needs this reset all the time. Canons are among the most popular digital cameras out there, and it makes some sense, because they've been in the camera so long.

I have a few other features I like. Canons are smart about knowing when you've taken a picture sideways and auto-rotates for you. Sonys are dumb in that way. Canons tend to pick its focus a little better. Sonys are dumb in this way. Sony has a quieter mechanical focusing mechanism. Canons let you set the number of seconds you see the preview. Sonys don't. Sonys buttons tend to rotate too easily, putting you in the wrong mode too easily. Oh yeah, Sony uses their own memory sticks which no one else uses. That's Sony for you.

If you've read this far, you will think I am talking about cameras, and I am, but I want to get back to my original story.

There I was, standing at Ritz, near an elderly Asian American (perhaps raised in the US). The person came in to buy a digital camera. They had no idea what to get. The Ritz person was suggesting a Nikon that she owns. I was telling this woman about the various choices she could consider. But you know what? She didn't want that. It took me a long time to learn about cameras. I had to relearn the "important" stuff about digital cameras, and I'm still far from an expert. I've become a point and shoot guy, for the most part, and that's fine with me.

Did I mention how many digital camera companies there are? Tons. Before digital cameras, you had a small handful of cameras. There were the Japanese makes: Nikon, Canon, Minolta. Then, you had some American makes, but they mostly sucked. These were Kodak and Polaroid. Both had given up on the SLR market (the nice camera market). Then there were the German brands: Leica and Hasselblad. The Germans weren't as quick to adopt technology as the Japanese.

You have to understand the camera industry has undergone tremendous changes, and the expertise required to make cameras have evolved a great deal. The earliest cameras were mechanical. There were little to no electronics except possibly the flash. Most of the work went into the shutters and apertures and the quality of lenses. As cameras began to auto-detect light and auto-focus, you needed lots of electronics in cameras. The Germans were slow to follow this. And the Japanese made these cameras affordable. You could get a low end Japanese camera for like two hundred dollars (admittedly, 1980 dollars). A German make would be two to three times that much.

Digital cameras meant that recording the material changed from film to CCDs. Someone had to store that image on the memory card, and so forth. The other parts of the camera were still about the same (focus, etc). But because you didn't have the moving parts for the film, you could shrink the camera, and it shrank.

Once digital cameras became popular, other companies came into the mix. The traditional camera companies, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Minolta brought out a large line of cameras. Kodak, long since out of it, was able to mount a small comeback.

Here's a partial list of companies that have joined the fray: Agfa (used to make film), Casio (calculators and watches), Contax, Epson (printers), Fuji (copiers, etc), HP (computers, printers), JVC (stereos), Kyocera, Panasonic (other electronics), Ricoh, Samsung (televisions, cell phones), Sanyo, Sigma, Sony (electronics), Toshiba.

There are around twenty different companies offering cameras, when there were maybe 6 before. Each company sells somewhere between 5 and 30 or more makes of cameras. That means, the average consumer has to pick from one of 600 models.

That's just way too much choice. And the fact of the matter is, with so much choice, you expect perfection. For example, not only do I want a camera that remembers my flash setting, that has a large screen, that uses a standard memory card, that can figure out the settings I have, I want fill flash (low level flash), a video out to a television, five times zoom, a good steady monopod attachment, good low light settings, etc. etc. Oh yeah, it has to be affordable too.

Each camera I get has new features I like but features I miss. And no camera ever seems to have everything I want. With so many choices, I feel I can demand this.

This is where Apple is smart. Apple has a line that is so small, that you can count them on hands and feet. Laptops? Essentially, they have 6 makes. But really, it's either the Macbook or the Macbook Pro. From there, it's the small, medium, and large sizes. That's it. I can't even name you all the brands Canon or Sony make of their ultra compact cameras.

Ipods? Apple has two kinds. The nano. The regular Ipod. For each, they have two or three sizes, mostly affecting hard drive space.

Thus, Apple has eleven products, and a bunch of accessories that are just side products meant to enhance their main product. And even then, you can reduce Apple's products to four items. Small Ipod. Large Ipod. Cheap laptop. Expensive laptop.

That is it. The genius of Apple is offering so few choices. If Sony or Canon or some other Japanese company made Ipod, they'd make twenty brands. There would be at least two or three competing styles of Ipods, at the very least. They'd have tons of options and tons more.

I had been listening to Barry Schwarz, a professor at Swarthmore, tell Google folks that too much choice is almost worse than no choice at all. Most people lack the time to get involved in learning how to find the best product. They want to be told what the best product is.

Choice is only good if you're willing to invest a lot of time trying to figure out what to get, which means knowing what you want, and then hoping to find it. And even with lots of choices, you're convinced that somewhere there's another camera (or computer) that had more features at a better price that you missed, if you had only searched more.

This is why Ipods are successful. They are a good choice without much thinking.