White_Wolf
Baseband Member
- Messages
- 92
Am I the only one sick of seeing computer/electronics products with too many features and needless bundled crap?
Lately I've been looking at such things as head phones, microphones, webcams, and camcorders.
When it comes to something like a webcam or a camcorder, it gets really tough to determine quality. I read a report/article that claims it's even more ridiculous to measure the quality of a camera/webcam/camcorder on megapixels than it is to measure the quality of a CPU by it's operation frequency or a PSU on its stated wattage; as all these numbers are useless by themselves and often marked up by the manufacturer.
So if the only info I get on a webcam is it's megapixels and resolution, than all I have left to go on is price to determine possible quality.
However, that becomes impossible when you consider that a $8 webcam may have identical quality as the $80 webcam, but the $80 version is only expensive due to its useless features and bundled software. Some of the useless features I'm talking about aren't completely useless, and for a lot of people might actually be of some convenience, but ultimately jack up the price for the feature. Some of these features include:
1. Face Tracking: I don't actually know how useful this is, but every product review on these things exclaims that the face tracking is slow and lags. So I am guessing unless the webcam costs $100+ it's next to useless. And I am curious as to what happens if you have a really ugly face? Will it do us all a favor and look away? But my greatest question is: what happens when there are two people (two faces) and they each move in opposite directions? I suspect the camera would get really confused and explode. Better yet, there are 5 people in the video… I imagine the camera just jumps back and forth like a schizophrenic on crack. And lets not forget the complication of Siamese twins trying to use this feature; one wants to be in the picture, the other doesn't… does the camera actually break down and start crying. And lets not get started on the guy who wants to upload his puppet routine to his youtube fans. Who breaks down and does the crying in this scenario, the camera, the puppet master, or the puppet?
2. LED back-lighting: I can see how this would be a convenience to some people. Personally I'll just position a lamp behind my computer desk, adjusting lampshade angle and lumens by distance, lower wattage bulb, or dimmer switch. Or better yet, I'll close the curtains on the window from behind me, and or turn off the 150 watt lamp behind me. I swear if I chat with one more chick who gets on the cam and I can't see her boobs because she has 10,000 lumens worth of light shining from behind her from the sun through the window, chandelier, and three lamps effectively turning her into a shadow from the camera's point of view, I will totally flip and kill someone!
OK, I get that some people with a laptop in an odd place may not be able to set up decent light on the fly and this could help. But chances are those LED's won't be bright enough, or too bright for how close they are and there will be no way of shutting the LED's off and you'll be all bleached out from over lighting. Imagine turning on your webcam and having a flashlight shining in your face that you can't shut off. I'm sure most manufacturers have a button to turn these darn LED's off…right? Of course with that blinding light in your eyes you're likely to hit the darn "launch chat" button repetitively and launch 5 video windows of yourself putting one hand over your face and swatting vigorously at the camera with the other.
3. Built in mic: OK, I get it, you want audio when you're on webcam. But the problem with a built in mic is that either it is pure crap, or just jacked up the price of the camera. Furthermore it's distance to your mouth is going to be equal to the lenses distance to your face. This forces the mic to be omnidirectional, ultra sensitive and or to boost mic input. Omnidirectional means it will pickup sound from everywhere, which just happens to include your voice. Let's hope you record in a quiet environment. The need to boost mic will amplify all the humming, RF interference, and other ambient sound to blend in with your voice (thanks to omnidirectional). And heaven forbid you actually start getting loud, because then you'll distort that crappy little mic. Get too close and you have to turn mic level down, back away from the camera and you have to crank the volume up. The only way a built in mic isn't going to totally suck is if it is at least a $40 cardioid mic and volume adjust knob, and has about a 20Hz – 20KHz response with low impedance, and an audio program in the bundle-ware that allows real time manual parameter adjustment for an auto noise gate, compressor, volume adjuster. Furthermore, through the same program that communicates with your OS to handle the video, it now has to compensate audio input. This alone will cut compatibility in half. It's one thing to stick a video or audio input device into your USB, but putting both on the same USB, forces a driver to be able to handle both the video and the audio. How about we all just start using a standard condenser $3 boom or lapel mic that plugs into the "mic in" port on our computer, unidirectional for direct voice input, or omnidirectional mic for all-around ambiance pickup. And if considering the world of microphones are as diverse in cost, style, usage, and performance as webcams themselves, I really think they should be separate entities.
4. Build in speakers: Why? No, really, why? I know it's rare to see this particular useless feature. But come on, who the heck doesn't already have headphones/speakers. Furthermore, not only does the camera now input 15 to 30 jpg images to your computer every second (a simple task for any OS to handle) but now it has to tap into your soundcard and transmit sound too. Again, OS and hardware compatibility just got cut in half. Furthermore, like these speakers are going to not suck? And further more if you are talking to someone via mic, their voice comes over the speaker, into your mic and echoes (thus voice chats should never be done unless both parties use headphones). This problem becomes hilarious when you take into consideration the ones that have the speaker and the mic built into it no more than an inch away from each other, guaranteeing feedback. And you just know some company has done this, and also decided to make the mic and speakers non mutable, thus causing instant feed back and nothing but feedback. The user solves this by muting the audio on his OS, and now can't hear sound from any device or application.
5. A button to load up default chat client: Why? No, really, why? You can't just click your shortcut? You can't just build a keyboard shortcut? And I just love the Cams by Micro$oft that make a non-changeable, non programmable, button that loads up Windows Live and nothing but Windows Live. Gee, what are the chances pressing that button on Linux causes an immediate system crash? And who here suspects M$ would actually go out of their way to force a system crash on Linux when you press that magic button LOL
How about instead of useless hardware add-ons, they actually took that money (materials, technology, and assemblers) and made a better lens, and better censor chip.
And all those pointless buttons to trigger unneeded special effects, what if they made buttons that served some relevant purpose, like wheel/POT that controlled the light sensitivity directly from the circuit. Now we could have a camera that is very light sensitive to work in low level light situations, but be manually lowered in high light situations, rather than attempting to use inconvenient bloated OS specific software to do it.
Now lets talk about the useless software bundles.
The very fact that there are so many useless software features means that each and every one of these features must ALL work on at least one system. If even one feature doesn't work with a particular OS or version, the "system requirements" stated by the manufacturer will be forced to name one highly specific OS, and alienating the user of every other operation system, or non specific version, including 64bit and 32bit crowd of any given OS. And if so much as one of these billions of needless features doesn't work on a particular system, or cause the whole software bundle to not work on a particular system, than users of that system will scream bloody murder about incompatibility and tie up the customer support lines with "Why won't it work?" and when they're not busy demanding refunds they'll be going to the website they bought it from and writing a crappy review of the product, effectively chasing off potential buyers who were scared off by all the negative feedback, or just never choosing the product because of the low amount of stars, eggs, or digs, the product received. So let's take this opportunity to sit back and laugh at the stupid software bundles that force these companies to shoot themselves in the foot.
1. Instant inserting of emoticons during web-chat: We'll start with the obvious: why? Why is this feature even needed? Now we'll move onto the next problem. Which emoticons will it display and in which messenger application? And on which operation system? And what happens if I don't even use this feature, will the very fact it exists force the code in the driver to work with one messenger only, installed on only one very specific OS? Probably.
2. Easy youtube uploading: Without having experienced this feature, I can almost say with certainty that it'll be just as easy if not easier to upload the saved video to youtube through your youtube account control panel. Furthermore, will it instantly upload to other video services? And considering all video hosting sites make uploading a video to their service easier than ordering the darn webcam online, again I say pointless feature.
3. Video editing software: Which will never be as good as the leading, or even ancient versions, of Ulead and Adobe video editing programs. Chances are you'll find only a hundred free programs from any local software download site that can do an equal and often better job than the bundled crap of editing and converting video on multiple OS platforms.
3. Special effects: Because god knows the 99% useless effects in the post-recording software bundle, and all the ones that come with the free equal-or-better video editing programs don't have enough childishness and pointlessness to them, we need our childish annoying and downright pointless special effects in real time. I don't know all the special effects these things come with, but here are just a few I remember reading about:
Hue shift: because we all want to see her boobs with a blue tint… this may be true for those with a smurf fetish.
Old Fashion film grain: as if the graininess of the crappy video quality wasn't convincing enough.
Monochrome/grey scale: Again, as if the washed out colors from the poor quality camera wasn't enough of an effect, we can totally bleach it and go all "goth" with a cool black and white. Yup we paid an extra $50 for a camera that captures in color, and then paid an extra $30 for a special effects software bundle to make it go back to black and white.
Motion blur: We pay top dollar to lower the amount of motion blur from the cam, but then paid for the software that allows us to make it super blurry.
Angular Distortions (funhouse-mirror effects): A lot of time went into building an image capturing device that would properly detect light, place it onto a sensor chip, and then properly align these pixels on a multitude of monitors and various screen resolutions. So it's only natural that they'd spend an equal amount of time figuring out how to screw up every part of that equation just so idiots who shouldn't be allowed within 50 feet of a computer could now annoy the heck out of everyone by showing off their cool and magical effects.
There are a lot more effects, but they are so stupid I can't even think of a critical or witty comment for them; the stupidity of the effect would speak for itself.
If these webcam makers want to give us a ton of software with our webcam, how about including an actual working driver to make the darn thing compatible with all commonly used Operation Systems? Seriously, skip the special effects, use the time and resources all that program took up, and invest it in building a driver for every single OS out there. It'd be quicker, cheaper, and serve a genuine purpose that the computer buying public has been screaming for.
I think these manufacturers need to start building more things that serve only one simple function; and do it right, rather than building something with 5 features that do none of them right.
Lately I've been looking at such things as head phones, microphones, webcams, and camcorders.
When it comes to something like a webcam or a camcorder, it gets really tough to determine quality. I read a report/article that claims it's even more ridiculous to measure the quality of a camera/webcam/camcorder on megapixels than it is to measure the quality of a CPU by it's operation frequency or a PSU on its stated wattage; as all these numbers are useless by themselves and often marked up by the manufacturer.
So if the only info I get on a webcam is it's megapixels and resolution, than all I have left to go on is price to determine possible quality.
However, that becomes impossible when you consider that a $8 webcam may have identical quality as the $80 webcam, but the $80 version is only expensive due to its useless features and bundled software. Some of the useless features I'm talking about aren't completely useless, and for a lot of people might actually be of some convenience, but ultimately jack up the price for the feature. Some of these features include:
1. Face Tracking: I don't actually know how useful this is, but every product review on these things exclaims that the face tracking is slow and lags. So I am guessing unless the webcam costs $100+ it's next to useless. And I am curious as to what happens if you have a really ugly face? Will it do us all a favor and look away? But my greatest question is: what happens when there are two people (two faces) and they each move in opposite directions? I suspect the camera would get really confused and explode. Better yet, there are 5 people in the video… I imagine the camera just jumps back and forth like a schizophrenic on crack. And lets not forget the complication of Siamese twins trying to use this feature; one wants to be in the picture, the other doesn't… does the camera actually break down and start crying. And lets not get started on the guy who wants to upload his puppet routine to his youtube fans. Who breaks down and does the crying in this scenario, the camera, the puppet master, or the puppet?
2. LED back-lighting: I can see how this would be a convenience to some people. Personally I'll just position a lamp behind my computer desk, adjusting lampshade angle and lumens by distance, lower wattage bulb, or dimmer switch. Or better yet, I'll close the curtains on the window from behind me, and or turn off the 150 watt lamp behind me. I swear if I chat with one more chick who gets on the cam and I can't see her boobs because she has 10,000 lumens worth of light shining from behind her from the sun through the window, chandelier, and three lamps effectively turning her into a shadow from the camera's point of view, I will totally flip and kill someone!
OK, I get that some people with a laptop in an odd place may not be able to set up decent light on the fly and this could help. But chances are those LED's won't be bright enough, or too bright for how close they are and there will be no way of shutting the LED's off and you'll be all bleached out from over lighting. Imagine turning on your webcam and having a flashlight shining in your face that you can't shut off. I'm sure most manufacturers have a button to turn these darn LED's off…right? Of course with that blinding light in your eyes you're likely to hit the darn "launch chat" button repetitively and launch 5 video windows of yourself putting one hand over your face and swatting vigorously at the camera with the other.
3. Built in mic: OK, I get it, you want audio when you're on webcam. But the problem with a built in mic is that either it is pure crap, or just jacked up the price of the camera. Furthermore it's distance to your mouth is going to be equal to the lenses distance to your face. This forces the mic to be omnidirectional, ultra sensitive and or to boost mic input. Omnidirectional means it will pickup sound from everywhere, which just happens to include your voice. Let's hope you record in a quiet environment. The need to boost mic will amplify all the humming, RF interference, and other ambient sound to blend in with your voice (thanks to omnidirectional). And heaven forbid you actually start getting loud, because then you'll distort that crappy little mic. Get too close and you have to turn mic level down, back away from the camera and you have to crank the volume up. The only way a built in mic isn't going to totally suck is if it is at least a $40 cardioid mic and volume adjust knob, and has about a 20Hz – 20KHz response with low impedance, and an audio program in the bundle-ware that allows real time manual parameter adjustment for an auto noise gate, compressor, volume adjuster. Furthermore, through the same program that communicates with your OS to handle the video, it now has to compensate audio input. This alone will cut compatibility in half. It's one thing to stick a video or audio input device into your USB, but putting both on the same USB, forces a driver to be able to handle both the video and the audio. How about we all just start using a standard condenser $3 boom or lapel mic that plugs into the "mic in" port on our computer, unidirectional for direct voice input, or omnidirectional mic for all-around ambiance pickup. And if considering the world of microphones are as diverse in cost, style, usage, and performance as webcams themselves, I really think they should be separate entities.
4. Build in speakers: Why? No, really, why? I know it's rare to see this particular useless feature. But come on, who the heck doesn't already have headphones/speakers. Furthermore, not only does the camera now input 15 to 30 jpg images to your computer every second (a simple task for any OS to handle) but now it has to tap into your soundcard and transmit sound too. Again, OS and hardware compatibility just got cut in half. Furthermore, like these speakers are going to not suck? And further more if you are talking to someone via mic, their voice comes over the speaker, into your mic and echoes (thus voice chats should never be done unless both parties use headphones). This problem becomes hilarious when you take into consideration the ones that have the speaker and the mic built into it no more than an inch away from each other, guaranteeing feedback. And you just know some company has done this, and also decided to make the mic and speakers non mutable, thus causing instant feed back and nothing but feedback. The user solves this by muting the audio on his OS, and now can't hear sound from any device or application.
5. A button to load up default chat client: Why? No, really, why? You can't just click your shortcut? You can't just build a keyboard shortcut? And I just love the Cams by Micro$oft that make a non-changeable, non programmable, button that loads up Windows Live and nothing but Windows Live. Gee, what are the chances pressing that button on Linux causes an immediate system crash? And who here suspects M$ would actually go out of their way to force a system crash on Linux when you press that magic button LOL
How about instead of useless hardware add-ons, they actually took that money (materials, technology, and assemblers) and made a better lens, and better censor chip.
And all those pointless buttons to trigger unneeded special effects, what if they made buttons that served some relevant purpose, like wheel/POT that controlled the light sensitivity directly from the circuit. Now we could have a camera that is very light sensitive to work in low level light situations, but be manually lowered in high light situations, rather than attempting to use inconvenient bloated OS specific software to do it.
Now lets talk about the useless software bundles.
The very fact that there are so many useless software features means that each and every one of these features must ALL work on at least one system. If even one feature doesn't work with a particular OS or version, the "system requirements" stated by the manufacturer will be forced to name one highly specific OS, and alienating the user of every other operation system, or non specific version, including 64bit and 32bit crowd of any given OS. And if so much as one of these billions of needless features doesn't work on a particular system, or cause the whole software bundle to not work on a particular system, than users of that system will scream bloody murder about incompatibility and tie up the customer support lines with "Why won't it work?" and when they're not busy demanding refunds they'll be going to the website they bought it from and writing a crappy review of the product, effectively chasing off potential buyers who were scared off by all the negative feedback, or just never choosing the product because of the low amount of stars, eggs, or digs, the product received. So let's take this opportunity to sit back and laugh at the stupid software bundles that force these companies to shoot themselves in the foot.
1. Instant inserting of emoticons during web-chat: We'll start with the obvious: why? Why is this feature even needed? Now we'll move onto the next problem. Which emoticons will it display and in which messenger application? And on which operation system? And what happens if I don't even use this feature, will the very fact it exists force the code in the driver to work with one messenger only, installed on only one very specific OS? Probably.
2. Easy youtube uploading: Without having experienced this feature, I can almost say with certainty that it'll be just as easy if not easier to upload the saved video to youtube through your youtube account control panel. Furthermore, will it instantly upload to other video services? And considering all video hosting sites make uploading a video to their service easier than ordering the darn webcam online, again I say pointless feature.
3. Video editing software: Which will never be as good as the leading, or even ancient versions, of Ulead and Adobe video editing programs. Chances are you'll find only a hundred free programs from any local software download site that can do an equal and often better job than the bundled crap of editing and converting video on multiple OS platforms.
3. Special effects: Because god knows the 99% useless effects in the post-recording software bundle, and all the ones that come with the free equal-or-better video editing programs don't have enough childishness and pointlessness to them, we need our childish annoying and downright pointless special effects in real time. I don't know all the special effects these things come with, but here are just a few I remember reading about:
Hue shift: because we all want to see her boobs with a blue tint… this may be true for those with a smurf fetish.
Old Fashion film grain: as if the graininess of the crappy video quality wasn't convincing enough.
Monochrome/grey scale: Again, as if the washed out colors from the poor quality camera wasn't enough of an effect, we can totally bleach it and go all "goth" with a cool black and white. Yup we paid an extra $50 for a camera that captures in color, and then paid an extra $30 for a special effects software bundle to make it go back to black and white.
Motion blur: We pay top dollar to lower the amount of motion blur from the cam, but then paid for the software that allows us to make it super blurry.
Angular Distortions (funhouse-mirror effects): A lot of time went into building an image capturing device that would properly detect light, place it onto a sensor chip, and then properly align these pixels on a multitude of monitors and various screen resolutions. So it's only natural that they'd spend an equal amount of time figuring out how to screw up every part of that equation just so idiots who shouldn't be allowed within 50 feet of a computer could now annoy the heck out of everyone by showing off their cool and magical effects.
There are a lot more effects, but they are so stupid I can't even think of a critical or witty comment for them; the stupidity of the effect would speak for itself.
If these webcam makers want to give us a ton of software with our webcam, how about including an actual working driver to make the darn thing compatible with all commonly used Operation Systems? Seriously, skip the special effects, use the time and resources all that program took up, and invest it in building a driver for every single OS out there. It'd be quicker, cheaper, and serve a genuine purpose that the computer buying public has been screaming for.
I think these manufacturers need to start building more things that serve only one simple function; and do it right, rather than building something with 5 features that do none of them right.
