Specs versus design

It’s a common ailment for a particular type of photographer to be obsessed by specifications.

- Professor Newman

I have to admit, I’m not immune from this. The camera review industry feeds this approach to camera selection, producing comparisons between products concentrating almost entirely on numerical data. For them there are two advantages of this approach. Firstly the numerical data is relatively simple and inexpensive to gather. Secondly, it’s much easier for the reader to compare numerical values as against nuanced opinions.

The reality of complex products such as cameras is that performance aspects that can’t be captured as simple numeric values are often central to the usability and usefulness of them. This became very plain to me last year when I bought my first action cam. It’s a market I’m not familiar enough with, and suffer from the added problem that I know too much about what goes into this kind of product. It’s a mass-produced image sensor, a ubiquitous ‘system-on-a-chip’ processor and a simple moulded fixed-focus objective lens. I could buy all the parts needed one-off for less than £20.