Last weekend, there was an interesting piece on 60 Minutes [cbsnews.com] about the increasing number of people who are unable to program or setup electronic devices on the market today (HDTVs, etc). And it worries me that I may become one of those people one day...
I am constantly amazed at how fast the process of selecting electronics changes. Back when I bought my first laptop (which is 10 years ago now), we had the web, but there weren't 50 million electronics review sites out there. If you wanted fair comparisons between competing products, you had to buy magazines. Not only was that expensive, but it was incredibly time-consuming. And in retrospect, the quality of the reviews wasn't as good as what you can find today.
Of course, most people (ok, a lot of people) use the web to look for reviews of consumer electronics that they are interested in buying. For instance, if you are looking to buy a digital camera, you can find information like shutter lag and barrel distortion that you wouldn't be able to 1)find on the manufacturer's website, 2)determine by looking at a floor model in a store, or 3)find in the manual (assuming you can find one of those). These days, I wouldn't consider making any kind of major purchase without reading reviews on the web. I mean, why would you? They're free. And numerous. In addition to being of generally high-quality.
A few years ago, I remember finding it difficult to find all of the manuals on-line for all of the devices that I was trying to compare. Sometimes, finding the manual is important, especially if you want to know exactly how to execute a certain advertised feature. For instance, I have seen fairly new (non-low-end) point-and-shoot digital cameras where you have to go through a menu to set the self-timer. I was shocked that on a new point-and-shoot, that there wouldn't be a dedicated button for the self-timer, like I have seen on countless other models. That is the type of thing I would want to read in the manual before I bought it (and it might be missed in the reviews). Luckily, manuals for any new device are generally easy to find on the web.
With me, selecting a piece of electronics to buy is really a tortuous experience. I can't just pick something and buy it. I have to figure out what the top choices are, read 10s of reviews on each of those choices, narrow them down, and then read all of their manuals. And unfortunately, I agonize over the decision (if you haven't figured that out by now). "Well, this one is $20 less. But it doesn't have this one feature. So, can I live without that, or is it worth 10% of the cost?" Multiply that by 1000, and you have my life. I'm amazed that everyone who knows me hasn't tried to murder me because I'm so annoying in that mode.
I discovered during my latest search that there is a new tool that is gaining maturity -- video reviews. You can go to YouTube [youtube.com] and search for the electronics device, and there will probably be at least one review. There are tons of features that are hard to evaluate by reading reviews or manuals. For instance, if you want to know how quickly an MP3 player powers up, you can see it in the video.
You just can't get that from reading a review. For one thing, if the device takes longer than average to power up, most reviewers will just say, "takes forever to boot up" instead of an objective measurement. Ok, how long is forever? And even you find a professional review where power up is measured in seconds, it's hard to determine if you can live with that delay, or if it is worse than on the device it is replacing. Can I live with a 3-second power up sequence, and 4 seconds is just way too long? Or is it 5 seconds where it really starts to get annoying? Whereas if you watch video of the device powering up, you'll immediately know.
Anyway, I still agonize over my choices in electronics (more on this later), but at least with videos, I'm having fun while doing it.
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