Digital Camera Buying Guide

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
          - Mark Twain, in “Chapters from My Autobiography”, attributed to Benjamin Disraeli

The phone rings. It’s dinner time. The voice on the other end says “I’m not selling anything, I’m just taking a survey. Could you answer a few questions?” Being a patient sort of person, you consent, and are faced with questions such as this:

In your view, what is the most pressing problem on the President’s agenda:

• the pruning of the White House rose bushes?
• which socks to wear at the next state dinner?
• or the unfortunate color of the carpet on Air Force One?

Of course you, as a concerned citizen, select the pruning of the rose bushes. The next day the newspaper trumpets “American people demand the President spend more time on domestic agenda.” Lies? Damned lies? Statistics!

And so it is with databases. The problem with databases is that certain information is easy to collect, store and display in neat little rows and columns. Add a colorful graph, post it on the Internet and you’re a guru. Take the so-called buying guides that regurgitate product-related trivia with the speed of a database demon, the flair of a Web designer and not a clue what they’re talking about.

Let’s consider the plight of that innocuous victim of featuritis, the digital camera. You could fill a database with tiny facts about digital cameras, then back the truck up and dump the data wherever anyone clicks the Search button (it’s a lot like spreading fertilizer, but they call it a “buying guide”). Soooo, how’s your ISO sensitivity? I hope your aspect ratio is holding up. My, that's quite a focal length you have there… You know, you really should buy Brand X over Brand Y because Brand X gives you 12.4 megapixels of resolution whereas Brand Y only gives you 12.0.

Do you think these clowns have any real experience or even the decency of telling you which of the 300 features is truly important? I don’t think so. How about a REAL expert, someone who spends his life working with digital cameras, someone like Udi Tiroshover at DIY Photography, who has a great article explaining what ISO is and how to use it. Or Kyle Schurman, the About.com Guide for digital cameras, who wrote an easily understandable article about choosing photo resolutions (megapixels). As a bonus, he mentions aspect ratio, but uses the reader-friendly term “width-to-length ratio”.

When you want to know what features are important when buying a digital camera (or any product), try the Significant Features List at Buying Guide. Believe it or not, it’s much easier to take a great 12 megapixel photo with a good camera than a 14 megapixel photo with a mediocre camera. But you’d better have the right kind of focusing mechanism and the right kind of lens. And no database is going to tell you that.