This post is directed at the consumer level camera divisions of ALL manufacturers of cameras (and some things could be directed at any consumer electronics manufacturer). These are just a sampling of my gripes and praises. I keep up to date with all the point and shoot model out in the market and play around with all the new ones when they come out...I get tired of the designers making the same stupid choices, so my rant is here for anyone to read and hopefully pass on points they agree with to the people responsible for giving us the junk that most compact cameras have become.

Have an idea that you don't see here? Let the rest of the class know down in the comments!

1) DO use a metal thread for the tripod mount, have it well supported the the frame of the camera. Kodak! Seriously, if I try to attach one of your cameras onto a tripod, the threads are going to strip. I also had a camera that had the tripod threading mount pop out of the camera because it wasn't properly attached to the frame, this is just ridiculous.

2) DO give the camera to your grandmother and see if she can use it before you finalize the UI...this is directed at you Nikon/Fuji/Olympus...your UI's really suck. Why have a "Menu" "Home" and "*" buttons? What should be under "Home" what should be under "Menu"? There should be a "Menu" that has a easy to understand sub-structure, like "System Settings" for clock, formatting, sounds, ect. and a separate area for mode specific settings.

3) DO give consumers what they need, not what they say they want. Did you give your kid the cookie because it asked or did you give it vegetables to eat? When a consumer says "smaller with more zoom", give it more zoom, but make sure you don't sacrifice image quality for it...Nikon/Olympus, do you hear me? A wafer thin camera cannot physically have a good sized senor and lens with 5-10X optical zoom without sacrificing too much image quality...therefore those cameras should not be produced. You may sell some, but no one that buys one of them will buy a camera made by your brand ever again! (and definitely won't recommend your brand to their friends and family!)

4) DO test to make sure your auto-white balance actually can figure out the difference between daylight and tungsten. Ask Canon for help if you can't figure it out.

5) DO leave digital zoom turned off by default. It's confusing to people. If they need more zoom, tell them to buy one of your more expensive models. Doesn't that sound good to you?

6) DO include GPS. This is a very cool feature that will eventually be standard in all brands. It does drain battery life though, so have it off by default and easily switched on by the user. Please don't make this crippled GPS like what Eye-Fi offers, which requires a WiFi hotspot to know where it is.

7) DO use brushed metal, and/or semi-gloss plastics for the outer shell of the camera. Glossy metal and plastic shows way too many finger prints and looks bad. Glass screens also are easier to clean than plastic screens. Plastics just make it possible for fingerprints to be visible half a mile away.

8) DO offer models that vary in color. If you must offer non-standard colors, don't pick "puke yellow" or "nuclear waste green", show it to 10 random people on the street and if even 1 thinks it looks bad, don't use that color.

9) DO remember that underwater cameras need to give good images out of the water too, that means don't put in folded optics, even if it makes it a little thicker. If you're trying to take pictures underwater, a bigger camera means you don't lose grip and have it sink to the bottom.

10) DO make sure when the average Joe holds your camera they don't cover the lens or the flash with their fingers, if even 2 out of 10 people do...it's back to the drawing board.

1) DON'T keep adding megapixels, the high ISO noise is out of control, compact cameras take worse images now than they did 3-4 years ago. Find something new to get consumers believing is the "Holy Grail" of image quality...like maybe a good lens?

2) DON'T add 20-30 "scene modes" to the camera for marketing purposes. Just make the image quality good and the UI easy to use, and salepeople will sell it for you. No one uses the scene modes...at least not on purpose. If your hunk of plastic has 30 scene modes and the other model has 15...your's is just more unnecessarily cluttered with useless buttons, knobs or menu options.

3) DON'T bother with exposure compensation buttons on $100-200 cameras. Exposure compensation is very useful...but consumers don't know how to use it and Casio...you shouldn't need to use exposure compensation at -.07EV just to get a properly exposed picture. Ask 10 people at Starbucks what exposure compensation is, and they'll tell you it has something to do with celebrities and the tabloids...

4) DO build cameras with better lenses. A faster lens is better than having "6400 ISO"...it might cost a little more but customers won't hate the camera they just bought when they're taking photos of their kid's birthday party. Even with a sensor 6X the square area of the average compact camera, ISO 6400 is a realm still avoided at all costs with pro-DSLRs!

5) DON'T use USB based charging systems! If you're going to have a rechargeable battery, make sure it's an external charger and doesn't use a AC cable, just have the charger plug right into the outlet. Even if consumers say they want to charge the camera directly from the wall...they're wrong. It causes cameras to short out if there is a power surge and they can't charge a battery while they're using their camera to take photos. If they say they want to charge it through their computer...they're wrong! People will loose their USB cable within days, leaving them with no way to charge their camera. A block the size of the camera that holds their battery to charge it will not get lost for months or years! 

6) DON'T make proprietary accessories if you can avoid it. If you must use proprietary cables for cheaper licensing or just after-the sale revenue, make it easy for consumers to find the cables for purchase on your site.

7) DON'T advertise a brand name lens like Schneider or Carl Zeiss if they're not actually manufacturing the lens for you and simply designed it for you or if you're just licensing the name, that's being disingenuous to the end user who thinks that the name Carl Zeiss means something, when the lens is manufactured in Tawain by another OEM. I'm not saying that the lens is bad, just that BMW doesn't buy Hyundai's and slap the BMW logo on it and say they make it.

8) DON'T include a large detailed manual. A quick-start guide is sufficient and an interactive computer based guide will help consumers a lot more than a 300 page book they'll never read.

9) DON'T use touch screens unless you have buttons as well. They're small cameras that are easy to drop, a consumer shouldn't have to use one of their hands to tap the screen. If you must put a touch screen in, make sure the grip is big enough so the user doesn't knock it out of their hand. Sony? Nikon? Bueller?

10) DON'T falsely advertise resolutions. If you're going to advertise HD video. Have it record HD video, not up-rezed SD wide screen. Don't interpolate 12 megapixels from an 8MP sensor. This goes to not only every camcorder manufacturer, but all the brands that advertise on QVC and the shopping channel selling "14 megapixel" cameras for $79.99.

Think of something I missed or disagree? Let the rest of the class know in the comments!

Wow, the past few weeks have been slammed busy for me, but I DID manage to squeeze in some personal shooting time (instead of spending the time blogging). I headed down to Great Falls National Park to test out a theory I had. A company called Singh-Ray makes a very expensive product called the Vari-ND filter ($350), which basically allows you to control how much light actually comes through the front of your lens. It doesn't effect color, depth of field or grain, and it doesn't directly effect shutter speed, but the reason why it is cool is that you can use much longer shutter speeds than you normally would be able to otherwise. A normal neutral density filter is just a dark piece of glass that reduces a fixed amount of light, the Singh-Ray filter allows you to adjust as needed. After watching the little animation on their site I said to myself... "that has to be through polarization!" so I decided to try and test my theory in order to save myself the $350. I tried two circular polarizers, but it didn't work as I expected, so I did a bit of research to discover that to make your own variable ND filter you need a circular polarizer and a LINEAR polarizer on top of the circular.

The circular polarizer on the bottom allows your autofocus camera to still autofocus and meter somewhat accurately because a circular polarizer is made of two layers, the top which polarizes the light and then the bottom layer that scatters the light a bit to allow your phase detection autofocus sensor to work properly.

I ordered myself a linear polarizer and gave it a good field test and it works great with one little caveat. If you stop the light down all the way as far as you can with this setup, there is a significant color shift to the blue spectrum. This effect is only seen if stopped down to 8 or 9 stops, which is rarely needed. I told a friend of mine about this issue and he's trying to come up with a solution that eliminates this color shift, but until then give it a go if you need to do some long exposures.

Here's some of my favorites from the two times I went down to Great Falls National Park this week. Most of these exposures were between 6 and 15 seconds long, which is what causes the normally rough looking water to look so creamy and smooth. None of these images have touched Photoshop, just some basic curves and white balance adjustment in Lightroom. If you want to do this yourself and already have a nice circular polarizer, all you'll need is a cheap linear polarizer and you're good to go!

The full rez gallery and other photos are at www.noahhayes.net/greatfalls

This shows you how rough this water looked without the long exposures! This was without the Variable ND filter. These guys kept climbing up the hill and riding the rapids down. Maybe I should get an underwater enclosure for my D3 and try it sometime?

Also we stumbled upon a little snake that was nice enough (or scared enough) to actually let me swap out my telephoto for a 105 VR Macro to get up close and personal (about 5 inches away from the front of my lens!)

The Variable ND array of B+W (my favorite) filters. Taken with iPhone 3GS