Ben Brooks talking about an article written by Tim Moynihan:
I don’t give a damn about this camera, but I think it offers an interesting glimpse at the market. That is: consumers are looking at the wrong specs. Traditionally in this segment it was all about megapixels, but now it seems to be all about: optical zoom and Wi-Fi. Both are horrible features to care about, let alone to base a decision on.
Ben’s right. Consumers tend to focus on specs far too often when making a decision, but when you focus on the wrong specs, you can’t possibly make an informed choice. Things like Wi-Fi are just part of what you expect to be there — those are features you say “oh, and it has Wi-Fi, right?” when you are ready to buy. That’s after you’ve already investigated all of the important things.
OK, go ahead and generalize about stupid consumers focusing on WiFi. Stupid should indeed hurt.
But hold short of talking about informed consumers and pros. Built-in WiFi can be an important feature, especially in the context of Adobe’s newly announced “Creative Cloud” system. I’d personally love to be able to instantly upload photos to client folders while out in the field and get client feedback while still there.
Though I lust after the new 1D X, Canon’s Powershot cameras are no slouches. The best camera is the one you have with you. And all the tech specs in the world won’t make a bad photo a good one.
Sorry Jim, but Tim Moynihan’s piece was an overview of recent announcements, not a review with recommendations so I’m not sure your or Ben’s beef is legitimate. Whilst I agree that ‘specs alone’ are a useless metric, what else is there to distinguish – at this level of photography, between makers offerings? They pretty much use the same or similar sensors, have the same picture quality, are the same size in the hand etc etc. The stand out feature might well be colour, bounce-ability or ermm…wifi.
Perhaps a better question would be ‘does it come with a phone as well?’
GPS and WIFI are no-brainers that should be on any decent camera these days.
I’ll probably get the Nikon D800 even though it doesn’t have the D4s Ethernet port and the WIFI adapter. It’s not enough to overcome the amazing 36 megapixels and resolution that you’ll get with Nikon’s best lenses (several of which I have).
But that 36 megapixels isn’t as important as high ISO performance. So I’ll be looking at that. And if I don’t like what I see, I may have to fork out another $3k and get a D4. But right now I shoot more at ISO 100 than at 25,600. Though that could change in the future.
It’s all a matter of trade-offs and what you’ll do with the camera.
Optical zoom is worthless in any case now that even iPhones have software to crop images. There’s no difference. WIFI, though is very important for pros, as is GPS. Just not important enough to decide yes or no on a specific camera. The only thing that counts is getting the best performance possible for the money.
At the end of the day, I’m pretty sure right vs. wrong specs matter only to the individual consumer user, and not to technical folks like us who follow/contribute to and assess blogs like this. Whether we think wi-fi and optical zoom are important or not, priority and import are up to the consumer with their payment in hand who is ready to continue feeding the market to stimulate production and direct the manufacturers’ production.
I agree that these are definitely add-ons and nice perks that come along after I weigh the specs that are important to me and my personal needs, but who am I to say that my needs and specs SHOULD be what everyone else should highly regard as well.
This article struck me a bit as to how one could possibly think that their progressive tech values should be the same tech values as other consumers when in fact consumers might not NEED the same specs as their neighboring user needs for their lifestyle.
If someone buys a cam bc of optical zoom and wifi, I say more power to ’em. Thanks for taking your first steps into understanding that there’s more out there than just optical zoom and wif. Give one of us a call if you’d like to explore them as you are ready.