August 23, 2007

Circuits

From the Desk of David Pogue

By DAVID POGUE

The other day, I was looking at some absolutely amazing pictures of my kids, on a beach, at sunset, that my wife took with our trusty Canon SD800 digital camera. It was just amazing to see the quality that could come from a little tiny shirt-pocket cam like that. I smiled. "Yep," I thought, "the pocket digital camera has finally arrived."

And I'm not alone. I often hear people tell me how much they love their cameras. The shirt-pocket camera is "there yet."

There's a lot of stuff, though, that's not there yet. I've been writing my Times column for seven years, and I'm still waiting for certain products and product categories to get "there." Yeah, sure, we live in a wondrous age of innovation and technology—but there's still a lot that won't arrive for a few more years.

Here are a few things I'm waiting for.

The pocket SLR. As much as I love that little Canon, its photos only sometimes attain the spectacular visual quality of an S.L.R. (one of those big black semi-pro cameras that cost over $500 and can't record movies). Apparently it's really, really difficult to get that kind of quality in a small camera, thanks to the obnoxious intrusion of something called physics.

Still, the barriers between the two are slowly falling. This week, Canon and Nikon both unveiled new S.L.R.s that behave like pocket cams in at least one regard: they let you frame your shot using the back-panel screen, if you like, instead of having to use the eyepiece for all shots. (Olympus's S.L.R.'s pioneered this feature.)

The great cellphone carrier. When the iPhone came out, everybody grumbled and moaned about how Apple had chosen AT&T as its exclusive carrier. I grumbled along with them—and then it hit me: Whom wouldn't people have grumbled about? People also hate Verizon, and T-Mobile, and Sprint. Everybody feels oppressed by the contracts, mistreated by customer service and victimized by billing gaffes.

I don't know why one of these cell executives doesn't just wake up one morning and realize that the way to dominate the cellphone industry isn't taking out more ads on billboards and newspapers. It's creating a service that's so good, the customers love you, recommend you and (here's the big one) don't leave you at the first opportunity.

The universal adapter. I'm very good about returning all the equipment I review. I'll confess, though, that I have a drawer full of orphaned black power adapters that, in the course of re-packing 500 products over 7 years, I somehow left out of the return shipping boxes. And because they're never labeled with the product or company's name (and because the companies never bother asking for them later), I now don't know where they go.

Here's the thing: every product has a different adapter with a different voltage and a different connector type. Wouldn't life be simpler for all of us if the industry could standardize these things?

The non-tape camcorder with tape quality. OK, OK, I get it: Americans don't want tape camcorders anymore. Sales and development of MiniDV camcorders are sinking. Sales and development of mini-DVD camcorders, hard drive camcorders and memory-card camcorders are on the rise.

I'd be delighted by the random-access pleasures of these new media types if it weren't for one deal killer: the quality isn't as good as tape. The manufacturers admit it. They have to massively compress the video to hold a reasonable amount of it on a memory card, mini-DVD or hard drive, and MiniDV tapes still offer better quality.

Why doesn't somebody lick this problem, or at least offer us a capacity/quality tradeoff? Don't they think we care about quality?

The all-in-one camcorder/camera. I've been writing about this mythical beast for 7 years, too. Apparently camcorders and still cameras need totally different sensor types for best results, so nobody's made a single machine that takes great stills and great videos.

Still cameras are getting there; one or two models can zoom and change focus while capturing video. But a real camcorder's image stabilization and microphone are still miles ahead of a still camera's.

The long-life battery. In the last ten years, cameras have gone from 1 megapixel to 12. Processors have gone from 300 megahertz to 3 gigahertz. Music players have gone from holding 20 songs to 20,000.

But batteries? Stagnant. Just sitting there, giving laptops the same old three-hour life they've had forever. When I grow up, I'm going to start a battery-technology company.

The touch-tone alarm clock. The modern clock radio can play CDs, wake up two people at different times, and even beam the current time onto the ceiling. So why do we have to set the time using the same controls cavemen used in the Stone Age?

You still have to hold down slow, imprecise buttons that, on most models, go only forward in time. If you woke at 8 this morning, you can't reset the alarm for 7 a.m. tomorrow without fast-forwarding through 23 hours' worth of flickering numbers.

Haven't these companies ever heard of a phone-style number keypad? We should be able to set the alarm for 8:45 just by tapping the 8, 4, and 5 keys in sequence. You'd save two minutes a night, which you could use for any number of activities, like sleeping.

I've been aching for this product for 15 years; in fact, the last three paragraphs came from my Times column of March 28, 2002.

I'm still waiting.

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