corporate connivery in digital cameras

[julianpenrod]

Julian Penrod

4 Fairfield Avenue

West Caldwell, New Jersey 07006

(973) 220-1601

julianpenrod@comcast.net

October 3, 2006

Letters to the Editor

Dear sirs:

It is understandable that there can be many levels of meaning to any occurrence. When the nature of many, if not most, of those hidden levels is malignant, it is reasonable to see the entire event as at best questionable, at worst, vile.

With the wealth of "choice" so many companies claim to provide these days, one also seems to find perpetual cases of a common occurrence now, namely, no one "choice" providing all that someone wants. Indeed, in general, nothing provided as a "choice", by anything from corporations to political parties, ever answers more than half of anyone's wants! The presence of some aspect a potential "consumer" might approve is automatically counter-balanced by the existence, often gratuitously, of some facet that will make their overall appreciation limited at best!

A case in point is instructive.

Consider the act of looking to purchase a digital camera. Go to any store selling them, and you will find shopping for a digital camera to be a prolonged exercise in aggressive disappointment. Get an increase in maximum resolution and you see the removal of "movie mode". Increase the memory and you lose control over picture quality. And there is the perpetual counter-balance to getting everything you want, namely, having to pay extra for it. Supporters of the evident shill of "market forces" will "argue" that it just represents the give-and-take of benefits at fixed prices, and the impact of the ultimate economic "reality" that "price dictates everything". A look at the situation, however, shows things much different, and more sinister!

Among other things, consider that the definitions of "benefits" and "quality", that the "rubes" are supposed to accept, to force them to accept prices, are largely unrelated to actual value! At the very least, among other things, memory these days is extremely inexpensive and simple to miniaturize, yet a modest increase in picture storage can represent a major increase in cost! Even more significant is the fact of the important aspects of camera operation that no company emphasizes in quoting price. They mention maximum resolution, total memory size, reducing "red eye" and size of monitor screen. They don't invoke, though, such things as the time between pictures. Many people like to take pictures quickly, but the companies never mention it. Also, many cameras take an interminable time just powering up before use, sometimes upwards of five seconds, but this is also not broached by the makers. Neither is the potential for photographing in low light or in the dark. Such facets as whether a camera will retain the settings you set, from use to use, even after it was turned off, or whether it will have to be reset each time, with valuable time being lost, is equally unmentioned. And, while camera makers may dutifully acknowledge if their camera has “optical zoom”, they don’t mention the significant difference between “optical zoom” and “digital zoom”, the first being an actual, lens assisted increasing of the size of an image, the second being just that part of the picture of interest being singled out, at the original size, and cut out from the rest of the scene!

People can get around limited picture memory, but they can't change the camera to cycle more quickly between pictures. If you can arrange for picture resolution to hundreds of thousands of pixels, you can get a rough equivalent of “optical zoom”, in a number of cases, but the camera will continue to take as long to power up as when it was purchased. Incidentally, an average camera's memory can be increased a hundredfold by just the addition of a $30 to $50 memory card, but just a modest increase in built-in memory can represent a $200 or more increase in the price of the camera! All the things that can't be modified are left unmentioned in selling a camera. It's as if they want the "pigeon" to think they can get a good camera at minimal cost, then, only after they get it home, they find it's not anywhere near ideal, and, when they return it, instead of going through the trouble of traveling back and forth with another undesirable camera, they simply opt to buy the most expensive camera available!

A ploy!

With respect to the issue of memory, too, eminently incriminating is the issue of the nature of picture storage. Most digital cameras store pictures in "jpg" format, which requires a degree of calculation. But there are degrees of compression for "jpg" that can differ in size by a factor of 8 or more. Just storing a picture in "jpg" format does not necessarily guarantee that it will take up limited space. Pictures comprise a great deal of material in terms of different colors for what could easily be several tens of thousands or more picture elements. Storing the information directly would result in pictures taking up easily 50 kbytes of space or more. Most methods of storing pictures, then, rely on using codes to “compress” picture information. Some of these are “jpg”, “gif”, “tiff” and “png”. But degree of “compression” can differ, even within certain coding methods, resulting in the same size image possibly taking up between 15 kb and 120 kb of space, even using the same coding method, based on how “compressed” you want the image to be. Because of this, someone can have an image “compressed” to one degree by the “jpg” coding of one camera, and the exact same image can be compressed to an even higher degree, also by “jog”, by another camera! If someone didn’t know this, they would assume that every camera would compress an image to one particular size, and could end up with a camera whose system clandestinely produces undesirably large picture files, when it could yield files of the same quality, but a fraction of the size! Many people’s computers, it appears, are unnecessarily crammed with picture files, often causing them to have crashes, likely forcing them to get new systems or at least buy expensive new memory, simply because their camera, without informing them, produces unadvisedly large picture files! This seems an immense and widespread problem, and, frankly, a cheat for the consumer, but how many people mention it?

Consumer Reports doesn’t seem to have wanted to unveil this eminent swindle of the public! They prate on about pixel content, ISO and “optical zoom”, but items like the speed of powering up, time of cycling between pictures and retaining settings between uses are rarely, if ever, brought up. And then, usually, only as a point of information, not as a facet on which to judge the camera’s performance. Consumer Reports also seems to prefer to limit its descriptions only to cameras that cost upwards of $250.00. Evidently, those at whom digital camera sales are aimed are primarily those who intend only to take posed, prepared shots, rather than getting split second, random pictures, and those who don’t mind sitting at home wondering what they did wrong that caused them not to get the picture, since it couldn’t possibly be the camera’s fault!

There are those, of course, shills for big business ruthlessness, who will say that this all makes sense, that it’s not a sign of corporate corruption. “You get what you pay for”, they will opine, tirelessly. They will do their best to portray the consumer as being unreasonable when they want a good deal for their money! “There’s only so much you can get for so much money”, they will observe patronizingly. “If you want better, then be willing to pay more, but don’t make the corporation the bad guy because they don’t want to give the cameras away.”

The corporation, in their assertion, is not the bad guy because they failed to inform the consumer of the difference in picture compression levels! The corporations are not the bad guy for doubling the price of a camera for just a modest increase in memory, when all it would take would be the addition of a $30.00 chip! The corporations aren’t the bad guy for not informing the consumer on the camera box that they can immensely increase memory with an inexpensive chip! And the corporations aren’t the bad guy for building gratuitously cheap cameras without optical viewfinders, to make people regret saving their money!

It’s all a sample of the connivery and corruption rampant in big business, today. The unrevealed information. Charging a lot for inexpensive alterations. Providing only trash inexpensively, forcing the naïve to spend obscene amounts for what they should have been able to purchase at the original inexpensive price! And, through it all, trying to make the consumer out to be in the wrong for wanting value for their dollar, saying they “want something for nothing”!

Be aware of all of these things. Get an inexpensive chip to increase your memory. Find out how to use your picture software to change the compression on your pictures to the highest possible. Be aware of the fact that cameras by traditional camera companies usually have good optics, but poor software, while cameras by companies known for electronics usually have adequate optics, but good software. If your camera downloads by means of a USB cable, however, it seems likely you can treat it as a “removable disk”. Just open up the My Computer window on your PC, connect your camera, wait until the new icon for the camera to appear, open that icon, then carry the pictures over to the folder you want to leave them in. Most importantly, be aware that, in everything, big business is evidently determined to rape you for every cent they can and, even if it doesn’t look like it at the moment, the likelihood is that one or another of their filthy machinations is going on constantly! Just being aware that someone is actively going about trying to scam you can keep you alert enough to prevent it!

Julian Penrod

[__Kratos__]

When I need to rant, I go and make a blog entry.

[RollingThunder06]

It is a great letter. Must remember though, most people have small attention spans.

[bathory]

get a myspace page

[Snowball]

World Event or Current Affair?

You decide.

[chaoszerg]

Jullian how many of these letters have you done so far on this forum?