Sometimes
I’m slow to catch on. For several days while trying
out an unfamiliar point-and-shoot I wondered what the target-style
partial squares were that kept popping up in the viewfinder
whenever I depressed the shutter button halfway.
Then — as I shot a series of photos of my granddaughter
and square after target- square formed around her head in
the viewfinder — it came to me. Oh, that must be face
recognition at work. That’s a feature. As usual, I should
have paid more attention to the manual.
With this cute little technological development, the squares
pop up whenever the camera thinks it sees the elements of
a human face. The idea is to make sure that all the eyes,
noses
and mouths, but apparently not ears, in your photos are in
focus.
I have to admit it’s clever, in a way, and supposedly
helpful in that you no longer have do your primary focus on
a face and then hold the shutter button down while you move
your viewpoint until you’ve got a well-balanced photo.
Neither are you required to hope that both faces in a double
portrait are sharp and clear, and so on.
Instead of being grateful for this breakthrough, however,
I found face detection a distracting annoyance, irritable
fellow
that I am.
At that moment, I asked myself, how do I get rid of this
face recognition feature? Where did I put the manual? Maybe
if I
just click through the camera’s menu I can turn it
off. Ah, here it is. Gone, thank goodness.
Then I thought back to a few months before when I’d
spent an hour and a half having various innovations on a new
line of cameras explained to me in detail — not, however,
including face recognition, which this particular company
has yet to offer, but most likely will in its next models.
The feature that took the longest to demonstrate, and seemed
fascinating to the person from the manufacturer, was the
in-camera ability to stitch a series of scenic photos together.
Once joined, these separate images would then form a panorama
of, well, whatever combination of woods, water and mountains
(or, say, series of carnival midway attractions shot at dusk)
seemed to cry out for such treatment.
(Photoshop CS3 also allows for far more elaborate seamless
stitching of images, but at least that’s outside the
camera, and not cluttering up an already complicated photographic
menu system. However, I digress.)
As well as photo-stitching, the manufacturer’s envoy
also demonstrated in-camera red eye removal, then moved on
to a feature that allowed users to make fat people appear
slim. Oh, and then there were the decorative borders that
could be
added to the images while they were still in the camera.
I’m sure if it were economically possible (which
it certainly is technically), the manufacturer would have
allowed theme-music MP3 files to be attached to the
panoramic images.
Once again, I had been shown nothing in the way of options
that I would use. But, as with face recognition, the marketing
department had been hard at
work, poring over the surveys that showed the most-wanted features by camera
users
and then including them in their next models.
I did wonder how much of a popular request the thinning
of fat people was, but it probably seemed at least a fun
thing to include in the options,
even if almost
no one used it.
Now I do understand why all this feature mania has come
to pass. Who can blame camera manufacturers for adding frivolous
items when they’re in an increasingly cluttered marketplace
where consumers are demonstrating less-than-stellar brand
loyalty?
J.D. Power’s figures from last year (the new ones should be out in a couple
of months) show that between 2005 and 2006 camera buyers in North America were
substantially less inclined to use brand as a guide to their purchases. In 2006,
just 26 per cent said they would purchase the same camera brand in the future — a
drop from 35 per cent in 2005.
To be fair, the more expensive the camera the better the
brand loyalty, but then when you’re tied to a series of lenses with a digital SLR, you’re
likely not to be able to move easily to another manufacturer.
In announcing these findings last year J.D. Power’s executive director
of telecommunications and technology research, Steve Kirkeby said:
"In a market where there is increasing product parity,
listening and effectively responding to the voice of the consumer
is crucial to manufacturers in providing products that will
improve satisfaction and brand loyalty."
The trouble with this general prescription is that there
is no one digital camera consumer. Over time, I’ve bought
many different cameras and currently I have three, one of
which is an SLR, one a high range point-and-shoot (too bulky
to be carried easily) and one in the lower mid range that
I can slip easily into a pocket so I stand a better chance
of avoiding theft (well, I like to think so).
So, while the manufacturers are listening to consumers at
all levels, the voice appearing to get the most attention
is that of the largest consumer base, the birthday party point-and-shooter
and those who like to capture family members standing in front
of monuments (okay, there is a photo somewhere of me in front
of the Arc de Triomphe, but that was in the early days of
digital photography and I won’t let that happen again).
True, in the entry-level mom and pop market there is some
basic concern with picture quality. Nobody, after all, wants
their
images more
than slightly out of focus or the sky to be a peculiar shade
of greenish purple, or to
have the
kiddies looking like the devil’s spawn because they’re
sporting glowing ruby red eyes.
But, let’s be honest, no one who shoots in the most
compressed jpeg format possible — in order to get the
most bang for the buck out of his or her one gigabyte photo
card — really cares all that much about the results
beyond a certain level.
And lest you think I’m exaggerating, a recent survey
by the PMA shows that the memory card (at 54 per cent of camera
users) is the second most used place to store photos after
the hard drive (72 per cent). Those two storage methods are
followed by CDs and DVDS (53 per cent) and prints (52 per
cent).
The fact that people actually use their cards for long-term
image storage boggles my mind — almost as much as the
concept that people throw away their original digital files
and just hang on to the prints, although that did happen back
in the days of negatives as well.
Such camera users (probably best not to call them photographers)
also spend a lot of their time sending photos to Web sites
where friends and relatives can view the kids frolicking in
their new wading pool. By then, of course, these already stunted
images been even further reduced in size, to the point that
they’re nothing more than a hint of an indication of
what they once might have been.
Unfortunately, the unnecessary features (well, okay, unnecessary
to me) seem to sneak their way up the food chain into the
more expensive cameras.
Eventually,
if we haven’t arrived there already, we’ll be faced with a mirror
situation to the digital option glut that already occurs in cell phones or photo
editing software, where only about the tenth of the features ever get used.
Now you can say, okay, don’t use the in-camera red eye removal. Or the
photo stitching. Or the ridiculous capability of making people appear thinner.
Or even the helpful face detection. Ignore those. Turn them off.
You ignore features in your cell phone; do the same with
the chance to put fancy borders on your prints inside your
digital camera.
However, simultaneously — and in my paranoid little
mind I can’t help wondering if the two of these are
connected — there has been a tendency, as well, to either
let good features go bad or ignore persistent camera problems.
But more about that in another column. 
When Microsoft took over the cross-platform image cataloguing
software iView Media Pro and announced it would change it
over to something it would call Microsoft
Expression Media, there were apprehensions expressed among Mac users that the
product — not cheap at $299 US — would eventually be phased out
for them.
I wasn’t worried. After all, I had done interviews
with the fine folks in the Mac side of things at Microsoft
and knew them to be a dedicated lot when
it came to products like Microsoft Word for the Mac and Office, etc.
I downloaded a test Mac version of Expression Media and
found it worked as well as the iView product, then sat back
and awaited the arrival of my new serial number to complete
the transition. That day came in early June when an e-mail
arrived telling me to hustle my electronic buns over to the
old iView site and pick up the new key I needed.
Well, it didn’t work when I downloaded it. Nothing. Nada.
After several tries, I wrote an e-mail to iView. No response.
Then I tried Microsoft help. First I was told because I lived
in Canada that I should
call a certain
number. Then when I dialled that number I was directed to another, correct,
one. Finally, I got a pleasant woman on the phone who took the details
of my problem,
sent me on to another pleasant person, a young man, who said he would
look into things, although he knew nothing about Expression
Media.
Then I went to the Microsoft forums in search of help,
only to find a huge group of outraged cross-platform users
whining that their Windows
keys
were working
but the Mac ones were not, no matter how many times and ways they tried
to use them.
Then came the message from Microsoft. Um, sorry, it said,
the Mac keys are defective, we will issue new ones. And
a couple of days later,
on a Sunday,
they did.
Hey, Microsoft, Mac users are already suspicious and cranky
enough. Would it have been too hard to get this right?
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