Pixiq

I am immobilized, staring fixedly at the 50 or 60 different cheeses at the “fromagerie“ booth at the farmer’s market in a small French village. There are stacks of blue cheeses, white cheeses, goat’s milk cheeses, sheep’s milk cheeses, cow’s milk cheeses, hard and soft cheeses. And these are only a fraction of the nearly 1000 cheeses recognized across France. I want to buy a cheese but there’s an echoing in my head that’s keeping me from deciding. I am in stall.  

The French describe this as, “Trop de choix, tue de choix” or “too many choices kills the choice.”

It got me thinking about the current state of the photo industry. About twenty years ago when you wanted to buy a Nikon camera there were just a couple of SLRs to choose from; the top of the line Nikon F model and whichever smaller Nikon FM series camera was current. Today Nikon sells eight different dSLR bodies--the D700, D90, D300s, D3000, D3100, D5000, D3S and the D3X. The situation looks worse when you consider Point and Shoot cameras. Nikon didn’t have any little 35mm cameras back then but now B & H Photo lists over 50 different Nikon Point and Shoots which is downright measly compared to Panasonic’s over 80 models. In total there are more than a hundred different dSLRs models on the market and over 300 Point and Shoot cameras.

Is that good? Research says it may not be. Though repeated and repeatable studies behavioral scientists have shown that when shoppers have fewer choices they buy more of something.

In one of the classic experiments, shoppers were offered twenty-four different jams to sample and after sampling the jams it was found that they’d bought a jam only 3% of the time or less. When experimenters reduced the choices down to just six jams, shoppers then bought jam 30% of the time. The experiments were repeated with other products like chocolate and hairspray and the results were the same.

The researchers concluded that “too many choices are demotivating.”

Renata Saled in her book “Choice” says that “with abundance of choices expectations have been inflated to the point that people begin to think that there’s a “perfect” choice.“

But they then refuse to make a choice fearing that the item won’t be perfect.

We are in the age of overabundance and too much of a good thing may well be bad news. In a further University study in England it was reported that 47% of respondents felt that life had become more confusing in the last decade and 42% actually stayed awake at night worrying about it.

As a photography writer I’m often asked by readers to suggest a digital camera for them to buy. Their emails usually mention their frustration in trying to buy a camera. They talk about going to a big box store and having a 20 something from the mobile phone department try to explain the workings of a camera that they obviously never seen before. This reminds me of the supermarket on the Simpsons, “the Monstromart” whose advertising slogan is “where shopping is a baffling ordeal.”

Readers often said that the detailed reporting in many photo magazines were too dense with tech talk and jargon and that they rating systems the used were hardly informative. They sometimes wrote as well that online websites were more confusing than helpful too.

Many of the emailers had simply given up looking for a camera until they hit on the idea of asking an “expert.”

Me. Well I have news for everybody I get just as confused as they do by the overabundance of choices. But this is something else the researchers found. In an abundance of products people look to others for guidance if not an actual choice.

That’s why “User Reviews” have become so popular. These testimonials are now on every website that sells anything. I have to admit up front that I have written a number of them myself but on the whole I find the reviews pretty useless. The reviewers fall into two categories: the people who love something and those that hate it.

Neither group really provides you the information you need to make an informed decision and as you go through them your realize how similar they are.

The lovers, like all lovers, are thrilled by every breath their beloved takes. They report on the clarity of the pictures, the ease of operation and the feel of the device in their hands as they walk down the street.

The haters are the rejected who wanted to love this object but can’t. They had hoped for perfection but were spurned. They grow bitter and say things like “Why did they have to put that button so close to that switch?” At time the pain screams through, “I had hoped that this would be the perfect camera for me, but it’s not.”

Then there are the other experts, the expert experts. They test cameras and report on them but too often they get caught up in bells and whistles and skip the bloopers. I remember once trying a Superzoom that had received a rave review at one of these sites. It actually felt cheaply made and its image quality was awful. But I can understand that few reviewers want to jeopardize their access to gear by doing a negative review, even if a camera or lens deserves it.

Chat rooms and other interactive websites are full of expert too but it’s hard to get information in the middle of a war. I go to a lot of these sites as I try stay current with digital photography and find that most of the time the discussions simply breakdown into extraordinary silly arguments and/or screaming matches.

A typical topic of the endless argument over “noise” and whether one camera’s noise at ISO 6400 is less than another’s. Then there’s the eternal civil war between the JPEGers and the RAWsters.

Twenty years ago when choices were fewer the discussions in the photography magazines and amongst photographers were about processing, glass and reliability. While there were dozens of different cameras to choose from there weren’t hundreds. As a photographer I learned as much as I could about processing film and I always tried to buy the best lenses for my cameras. And those few extraordinary lenses had to be used on photo taking machines built like tanks, that could be abused and beaten up and keep on working.

When I look at the specifications of the myriad of today’s cameras, glass and reliability aren’t spoken about.

And I have to confess that although I understand what the different specifications mean I’ll be damn if I can tell you what in the world difference these differences really make in taking pictures.

I’ve spent my life as a photographer and I can imagine the hell it must be for an average person wanting to buy a camera.

They probably do the other thing researchers discovered. When faced with too many choices people make arbitrary decisions. They end up selecting things at random based on a mish-mash of hearsay and frustration.

So the question I am posing is whether the photo industry by increasing the number of camera models, that is choices, isn’t unknowingly creating confusion and reducing the ability of consumers to make intelligent choices --or worse yet making it impossible to make any choices at all?

For me the alternative is a device like the Flip video camera. It represents an example of how fewer choices-- both in number of models and features-- can create a winning product that consumers buy and understand. With its straight forward operation—got to love the big Red Button—if makes movies without the user knowing anything at all about digital movies. That’s why the Flip has outsold all other video cameras and taken the lion’s share of the video market.

I think we could use a couple of Flip type cameras in digital still photography and about 295 fewer of the rest.