Lately I’ve seen several good articles or tidbits about specifications and was surprised to see some hatred for them
You know, specs. That short little list of things that is supposed to be the technical description of a product. I just read this New York Times article of the commandments to electronics manufacturers and it’s good stuff. Several of the commandments are directly related to documentation, and to troubleshooting, but sometimes the documentation is used before the purchase, such as reading the specs on a digital camera.
As Gizmodo points out, and Commandment III also describes, sometimes megapixels aren’t the whole story.
“III. Thou shalt not hype irrelevant specs. The digital camera industry wants us to believe that a camera’s quality is somehow related to its number of megapixels. A seven-megapixel camera must be better than a four-megapixel one, right?
It’s the same with computers, where millions of people still believe that the higher a computer’s megahertz, the faster it runs. (To its credit, Intel has recently started playing down that simplified statistic.)”
For digital cameras, the sensor size, which collects the light for the image, limits the sensor’s ability to get the whole picture, so to speak. So a 10-megapixel Sharp camera with a CCD sensor of only 38 square millimeters compared to a 10-megapixel Canon 1DS Mark II with a full-frame sized sensor of 864 square millimeters, well, you just can’t compare on megapixels alone because one the sensors will collect a lot more light for you. It seems as though there’s an hype encroachment even on technical specifications where you have to educate yourself just enough to know which specs matter and which ones don’t.
My other favorite commandment from this list is:
“I. Thou shalt not entomb thy product in indestructible plastic.”
With the holiday season coming up, I don’t look forward to the battle with toy packaging. We plan to unbox (debox?) every toy before wrapping in gift wrap. With the twist ties, zip ties, and extremely sticky tape that binds toys to their display box, it’s always a struggle to free the toy from its temporary home.
Back to specifications. Both as a writer and a consumer, I solemnly swear to examine all specifications for hype, and de-hype them before documenting them for a customer or making a purchase as a customer.