Camera Lies & Navigation Systems

Something I hate: Camera ads that straight up LIE.
Recently camera manufacturers have been introducing Image Stabilization into a lot of their point and shoot cameras. Great. The problem lies in how they are advertising their Image (sometimes called Optical) Stabilization. Let me explain how IS works… it greatly reduces camera shake (your hands being shaky during a longer exposure) usually using some sort of electronic gyros. What it does NOT do is freeze action.

I’ll give you a practical example: you take a twilight sunset shot at 1/20 of a second… a shutter time that would normally render a blurry picture, but because of your IS, yours is crisp. Another example: you take a shot in a gym of someone playing basketball. With no flash, you achieve a shutter speed of 1/100 of a second. That picture is BLURRY, not because your hand was shaking, but because the person in it is moving too fast to be captured by such a slow shutter speed. Make sense? (as a sidenote, you want to hit around 1/400s as an absolute minimum for most sports).

So in the Sony ad where that guy is talking about his muse and then takes a picture of a hummingbird that isn’t blurry at all and shows it to his friend and his friend is like “you’re right, that would have been blurry on my camera”… yeah, it would be blurry on ANY camera. To stop a hummingbird's wings you need a shutter speed around 1/4000 of a second. If you have a camera with a pretty wide aperture (letting in a lot of light) and a high film sensitivity (or ISO, for digital), you can sometimes achieve shutter speeds close to 1/100 of a second in a normal office environment. Here’s what this boils down to… there’s no way that camera can take that picture indoors… ever. So why advertise that it did, and that IS helps make it “not blurry”… why lie?

Part two of this debacle is a new Panasonic commercial that I was subjected to while trying to enjoy my beloved NFL this weekend. They are using a Panasonic point & shoot with optical stabilization to take non-blurry pictures of people dancing in a dark nightclub. Once again, it’s not blurry thanks to optical stabilization. While the stabilization might have kept your camera steady, it cannot slow down the people dancing… they would still be wicked blurry. Now… that could be a cool shot for artistic effect, but it’s not the shot they are pretending comes out of the camera. Again… stop lying!

Lesson: YOU CANNOT FREEZE ACTION WITH IMAGE STABILIZATION!!! The only thing that freezes action is fast shutter speeds.

Something that I love: Cell Phones with Navigation Systems
Keeping on the technology train here… Ok, I have to admit I don’t have one of these yet, but I’ve seen them advertised and read a bit about them. At first this might seem a bit excessive to you, but just think about this for a second. Navigation systems (a la MS Streets) have been in PDAs for years, why not put them in cell phones? How did this take us so long? It’s genius!!! This is one of those forehead smackers where you just go *smack* “Of course! It just makes sense!”

Can you think of a handier thing to have in you cell phone? I doubt it. I mean, anywhere you are, you can find anything. I shoot photos for the paper sometimes, and if I just had something where I could input the address and it would tell me how to get there… well that would be downright awesome. You’re out of town but want to find the nearest Wendy’s? No problem. Need to know the quickest way back from Wrigley? Done. You're downtown and want to find the nearest Chinese food? Bingo. Think of all the times you’ve been lost, or looking for something specific in a strange place… this is the instant answer. Pretty good idea if you ask me…