I recently bought a new digital camera. A well-known brand, it was on sale but listed for nearly $200. When I bought it the salesman tried to sell me a memory card. His sales pitch was that the camera could only store 10 pictures. Laughing to myself I thought how good it was to be an engineer and know such a thing was impossible given the price and density of modern memory.
When I got home I extracted my new treasure from its packaging. Luckily the battery was mostly charged, so I ignored the user manual and started taking pictures. One, two, three, then nothing. With some investigation I discovered to my amazement that the salesman wasn’t lying to make a sale. The 15 MB of internal camera memory could only store 3 high quality pictures. It could store 10 in mediocre quality. Further investigating the user manual I found a table estimating the number of pictures that could be stored for various external memory cards. The manual estimated that a 2GB memory card could hold well over 1,000 mediocre quality pictures.
Let’s think about this. Those of you old enough to be familiar with 35mm cameras might remember film came in rolls that could take 24 or 36 pictures. Building a camera that can only take 10 pictures defies reason. What engineer would build such a thing? What project manager with an engineering background would approve the release of such a decrepit product? In fact, for an extra couple of dollars, maybe 1% of the retail price, the basic camera could store hundreds of pictures.
Ah, but marketing trouble looms. Far few customers would buy a memory card if the camera, fresh out of the box, could store hundreds of pictures. It seems memory cards have a high profit margin and the marketing team insists that digital cameras be designed and manufactured in an intentionally crippled form so that the company can sell more digital film. Of course once someone buys one memory card they are more likely to buy a second and third. Building a camera that can only store 10 pictures is not a function of bad engineering but of good marketing – at least in the view of the corporate leaders making the decisions.
The occasional chasm between what is viewed as good engineering and good marketing can be discouraging and stressful to both groups. This difference in vision can also translate to vastly different product concepts. Engineers tend to want cool features but, sadly, it is rare for marketing to be on the side of the consumer. Marketing tends to focus on extracting more money from the consumer and getting them to buy accessories and to pay for additional features.
In the case of the camera, the marketing approach was effective in getting me to buy a memory card. Clearly the decision makers and the marketing team earned their bonuses.
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But wait, there’s more. This marketing ploy left a bad taste in my mouth and I would have to guess this is not just because I’m an engineer. Like me, most people don’t like being taken advantage of.
Over time the public becomes bitter and turns against manufactures, institutions, and individuals whom they feel have abused their position and taken undue advantage. In contrast some people develop a near religious devotion to manufactures they perceive as building products that, while expensive, provide value. These manufacturers don’t nickel and dime their customers. In turn their customers form long lines at stores the night before the release of a new product. While these elite manufactures may lose out on the sale of a few memory cards, they are rewarded with market dominating products that sell millions.
Penny-wise and pound-foolish says much about far too many modern companies.
No film camera I ever bought came with the internal capacity to hold 12, 24, or 36 shots. I had to add an external memory device to store pictures. (It was an analog media called film, but the analogy is pretty exact.)If a camera’s internal memory is the primary storage system, then the camera also has to come with a $1 USB cable (mini-A to A style?, 24 or 36 inches long). And if you’re planning to take your camera on a real vacation (say a trip that’s important to your family) are you not going to want to take multiple flash cards with you to be sure you have plenty of space for all those photos the wife will want you to take of her? 8-)I don’t mean to suggest that your entire point is wrong. And usually buying extra at the point of sale is financially the wrong move so leaving the store without the card can be sold off after the fact as a smart move.But I’d rather have the manufacturer toss in a 2 GB or 4 GB high speed flash card than have it built into the camera.PS: Name names. Who made the camera? What model is it?
The last time I bought a digital camera, I –a. figured out an approximate price range I wanted to be in.b. found a specific product that best met my needs and wants in that price range. (I happened to want nice optics, a good optical zoom range, a real rangefinder, and one that took standard SD cards but that isn’t important.)c. I then put that specific model number into Froogle (Google’s product specific search engine) and bought it from the lowest price source.I would imagine that most people’s process for buying consumer products is like this. These products are very price sensitive. The engineer in me would love to see the camera companies just give me 1 Gig of flash and get rid of the card socket altogether. Even with endurance issues, I will almost guarantee you that the socket will die before a board mounted flash would. That would put me in the minority, though – people are used to SD cards. The photo kiosks at Wal-Mart and Target aren’t set up to print my picutes with bluetooth, wi-fi, or USB – they use cards. SD cards are portable across many devices. And most importantly, my wife and oldest daughter are comfortable with the concept of working with SD cards. So, while I would agree that more memory would be better, without a customer base demanding it, and with a customer base so price sensitive that it would punish the feature, it is unlikely that a manufacturer will respond to the need.
"I would imagine that most people's process for buying consumer products is like this. These products are very price sensitive."Really? MOST PEOPLE? Most people can't hook an ATSC receiver up to their TV. Most people go to Best Buy and buy what the sales dweeb points them at, or the prettiest box. The world doesn't buy the better mouse trap."The engineer in me would love to see the camera companies just give me 1 Gig of flash and get rid of the card socket altogether."Well, the Italian tourist in me sure wanted a pocket full of SD cards so I could shoot pictures (virtually) without limit by changing out 1 GB cards at my leisure to reduce risk to pictures taken resulting from camera death, camera loss, or some other unplanned "disaster".
You are missing the point my friend. As an engineer that claims fame to so many achievements on the field you should know that a company does not make the profits in the bulk but in the disposables. That is no news to any of us and has been the case since the very first successful apparatus ever sold!Second, you are not telling "all" the story here. With the analog cameras (aka as indicated above those requiring film) the actual cost per picture seen is well over $15 per picture. Think about it, first you need the camera (most would had come with no film) then you need to buy the film rolls, load the roll in the camera -and hopefully you did this right because there was no second chances without loosing a frame or two- once you took the picture you needed to "believe" it was worth taken, after you finished with the roll you needed to wind it back -some manually some automatically- and put it back in its protective plastic storage until you had the time or quantity of rolls worth taken to the store to be developed -granted you were no pro with your very own developing "dark" room… and so and so on… at the end it was time wasted, money throw away and unconvincing to go through all that pain -unless you were one serious photographer and made a leaving from it, but uh, there was no digital cameras -leave aside the wonderful Polaroids- to allow instant gratification and "cost" saving approach to photography. Bottom line, with today disposable digital cameras, one can take any photos any time, any where and see them instantly. Uh, did I mention, you do not even have to worry about the embarrassment of taking questionably pictures to the local neighbor developing house?