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May 16, 2005
[ IF AT FIRST YOU DON'T SUCCEED... ]
READ THE MANUAL!
A pal rang the other day begging dpexpert for help. His wife had taken his Canon Powershot S45 to a party. She in turn had allowed another party goer to use the camera. He took some photos, which he presumably considered to be masterpieces, so he "protected" the photos and my pal couldn't work out how to unlock them to erase them.
"Have you read the manual?"
"Of course not!" Well, who reads manuals? The Canon comes with a 180 page instruction book. Who is going to read that?
There is a bizarre assumption abroad these days that all new technology must be user-friendly, meaning that everything about it must be immediately obvious. Digital cameras are no exception.
However, the facts of digital life are that cameras come with a bewildering array of features, buttons and menus that are by no means intuitive. Like it or not you must read the manual.
The Canon s45 has nearly 100 settings accessible through the menus or knobs and buttons on the camera body. These range from the really useful, such as custom settings for contrast and sharpness, to the plainly wacky -- choosing custom start-up sounds and pictures for your LCD screen, or your very own shutter click.
There is no doubt that the manufacturers are making cameras too complicated by adding features that no one wants or needs. Even adding to still cameras the facility for taking short, low-resolution movies with sound seems like they are doing it just because they can, not because it adds to the usefulness of the camera.
However, the way that digital cameras function means that many useful features can be added that are not possible with film cameras. For instance, one digital camera can be like carrying several film cameras loaded with film of different speeds and contrasts and in either colour or black and white.
In a digital camera you erase the dud shots on the spot and you don't pay the photo lab to process them.
My pal's Canon lets him choose between fully automatic mode, program, shutter or aperture priority exposure and fully manual. This is what you would expect from a good film camera, but you don't expect the use of such a versatile camera to be intuitve.
He also has settings for portrait, landscape, sport, night and panoramic photographs, where the various exposure and focus permutations are selected for optimum results by the camera itself. But you won't guess how to use them just by looking at the camera.
dpexpert is unimpressed with the Kodak and Olympus practise of providing user manuals on CD in pdf form. The manual for the Olympus C7070 is 222 pages about 12 cm by 16cm -- in other words the pages print in a small area of an A4 sheet. To expect the camera buyer to print and bind the manual is absurd and to expect them to figure out how to access all the features of the camera without a manual is sheer wishful thinking.
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Posted by terry at May 16, 2005 09:49 AM
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Comments
I think you're being hard on the practice of only giving out manuals on pdf formats. Lots of people DON'T read the fine manual (DRTFM) these days, it's not a new trend, it has been with us since the first electronic watch or the first VCR. Life's too busy for normal people to read manuals and if you're geek enough (either photographically or computerwise) to want to read a manual, pdf will not be a impediment. In fact, I like pdf manuals, particularly if I can cut bits and paste them into my pda or my phone - whatever now serves as the photographer's notebook (the what? - don't you keep a record of f/numbers and shutter speeds anymore?)
Many people are skim readers - that is, they want information at their fingertips and they want their relevat information, not 300 pages of what we want to tell them.
The dreaded Microsoft Office Assistant was programmed with the most topical answers to the most terse questions - it sometimes succeeds. A human editor would be better, and that's where we come in.
Let me give you a germ for a new article:
dimensions of prints (3R,5R etc...) in mm vs dimensions of typical electronic images captured by cameras. Framing your photo in the viewfinder for both targets (print and electronic display). Parallax with optical viewfinders. How to influence cropping at the retail outlet. Image resizing vs cropping.
Posted by: Ananda Sim at May 16, 2005 02:34 PM
I find either ok, although I must admit I like to sit down with the good little Nikon manual to work something out. The thing that is sometimes a bother, is trying to interpret the curious translation from the original language to English. It's a problem which dogged me during my working life in the building industry, some of the instruction sheets for hardware were virtually incomprehensible, and were quickly discarded and the modus operandi worked out in ones head. Thankfully, camera manuals are much better and not too hard to decipher.
Posted by: Duncan at May 16, 2005 07:25 PM