Wired Magazine recently had an article “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple is Just Fine” which talked about applying the 80/20 rule (20% of the features and functionality that 80% of the customers/users need) to consumer technology, such as video cameras, among other things. I have to say that I increasingly believe in the simplification of user interfaces and devices with increased focus on core performance and functionality, especially as digital cameras get loaded up with more and more ’stuff’.
Veit will separately cover the 80/20 rule as it applies to software, so my goal is to talk specifically about camera/digital imaging hardware. Of course, sometimes, it’s arguable where the hardware ends and the software begins when it comes to features, but I’ll try my best.
The most obvious application of the 80/20 rule is to Megapixels vs. quality:
Here’s a quick quiz question (when’s the last time you saw 3 Qs in a row in a sentence?)–what is the single most important piece of hardware to get right in a digital camera? That’s correct–the imaging sensor, whether it’s a CCD or a CMOS sensor. The reasons for this are pretty obvious, but basically the larger the sensor and the larger the photosites on the sensor, the more light you collect per site, and the more and higher quality raw data you have to work with, and therefore the less noise you have to carry through, in low-light conditions, to the actual image.
When you get right down to it and ask both the average non-tech consumer or the average $2000 DLSR user what he or she cares about most, she’ll say ‘a great picture’ (vs. Veit, who would say the quality of the glass)’. Everyone wants most to have a great image but also, not surprisingly, want the most megapixels.
If you buy a new digital camera and tell 5 people about it, I guarantee 3 to 5 of them will ask right away: ‘How many megapixels is it?’
Okay, so now you look at it from the standpoint of the engineers and product managers who are designing the cameras and deciding on the trade-offs between various hardware capabilities–geo-tagging, facial recognition, built-in pico-projector, HD video capability, size and resolution of CMOS sensor–they have to make a lot of decisions, and I doubt they’re going to sacrifice other cost items like those listed above, so they can primarily focus on the quality of the sensor. Nor are they going to focus on the quality of the sensor in most cases at the expense of the number of megapixels that the camera can resolve.
It’s important to understand that you can have an ‘X’ MM sensor that resolves 8 MP or resolves 12 MP or some other number. But either way you go, you’re ultimately working with the same total sensor size and light collection capability, and you have to make tradeoffs. You can get 8 or 10 MP with better quality input and low-light performance, or you can get 12MP or 14.2MP with higher theoretical resolution, but lower per-megapixel quality. SInce consumers often care most about megapixels as one of the two key factors (this is something that shows up routinely in surveys and from the industry execs themselves when they have asked consumers what shapes their decisions) in purchasing digicams, the manufacturers give them what they want–more megapixels at the expense of highest-possible-quality images at a lower megapixel count, which would actually serve the customers’ interests in good picture outcomes better.
Why should the average consumer care more about a great 8MP image vs. an okay 12MP image? Because most people print or have printed for them 4×6 images or 8×10 images, and an 8MP camera is more than capable of making a great 8×10 print. Theere are actually a few cameras now that are trading the highest possible pixel-counts for higher quality at ‘good-enough’ pixel counts–a trend I and Veit both heartily applaud.
I’ll continue this line of thought in a follow-on to this. If I go too much over 500 words, Veit will beat me and send me to my room under the stairs without my bowl of grewl and piece of stale pumpernickel…:)
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