Why would anybody buy a car that has a top speed of 175mph, performs at it’s best between 80mph and 150mph and gives a deucedly hard ride at any speed, if he is afraid to drive at more than 60mph in a straight line on an empty road? After all, cars like that are very expensive.
He could rationalise that, “the car will do it if I ever wanted it to” … or “the car’s working well within it’s limitations, so that’s good, isn’t it?” Well, we all know that this is a load of old flannel, don’t we? It’s the pose value and the joy of ownership and the “look at me” factor.
Well, that’s all fine and dandy when it’s cars, but here’s a funny one. What about cameras?
You see the whole principle of “what camera do I buy” when thinking about the cost, has been turned on it’s head since the advent of digital cameras.
In the old days (well, not that old), one looked at quality of build, lens performance and just … well quality. After all, if one started out with a good quality camera, all one had to do to upgrade (horrible modern, overused and misused word – sorry), was to load a better roll of film into it!
Well, it’s all a bit different now. Try doing that to a digital camera! Well, here’s the funny bit. A man goes into his local photographic specialist (sorry, scrub that … camera shop), and buys the latest whizz bang SLR (single lens reflex), pays his money (lots) and goes home to read the instruction book (non-existent … it’s on-line).
There, in amongst all the details of the camera, many of which he may struggle to understand, he sees that there are many ‘quality’ settings he can use, every one of them compromising the cameras performance, except one … the best.
Something he notices about the so called ‘quality’ (lack of quality – except the best!) settings, is that the lower the ‘quality’ the more images he can fit onto his memory card. “That’s a good idea,” he thinks, “that means that I can snap away to my hearts content at anything and everything and not worry about running out of memory.”
And yes, for those people who ‘store’ their memories in a camera (odd!) it probably is an appropriate setting to choose, but didn’t he buy this superb piece if electronic whizz bang for the quality … or was it something else …?