X Speed with Y Noise and why you need to look twice at marketing specs

It started years ago, and it’s not just the camera industry. As we jostle for people’s attention, we pass out sound bite selling points as specifications which are true, just not true together. I remember when I was a VP at Photometrics we launching the 95B to a few selected salespeople in my hometown of Birmingham and the big point of the camera was that it was 95% QE. We had t-shirts made and asked a guy outside our meeting room to take a picture of us, he said nice, 95% - why did you miss the last 5%? Customers think like this, they want simplicity – they want to avoid selection questions – we all want it simple.

FYI it was an excellent camera, however if you were doing XYZ but for ABC it was not what you wanted. And that’s the point, exactly that, it’s like when I have to look at my horses in my stable and select which one I want to use for the next upcoming course, I need to match them carefully. Horses for courses I always say. Anyway, I’ve tested the Tucsen equivalent, Dhyana 95V2 and found it equal or better.

As I note, this comes from a desire to obtain a customer’s attention – we want to grab headlights, customers seek simplicity and there is the miss-match. All of this does zero to help the customer. We need specifications but we really need to know how they fit into our world to do our job.

Customers want simplicity as we want to live in a self-selecting amazon style world. And some of us can select with accuracy because we know the market and the technology, but most people don’t and they want to be told what is best, controversially not by human but by specifications. Specifications are just numbers but at least numbers seem fast and we don’t need to feel the yucky feeling of being sold to.?

Let’s look at a few examples of where specifications are miss matched.

“EMCCD level performance with a smaller pixel.” There are some outstanding cameras out there with 0.3 electron read noise, but the pixels are smaller and so is the full well – if you wanted an EMCCD be prepared to be upset.

“100 fps USB sCMOS 30,000 electron full well.” We see this but please be aware this is probably with a small full well in an 11 or 8-bit mode. If you can afford to work at this level with 1000 electron full well fine, its perfect – but if you read it wrong, you thought you were getting all this with a cost, didn’t you?

“0.7 electron read noise 500 fps.” These are true facts for one camera, just not possible at the same time. It’s an awesome camera – just be aware what you’re getting and if it does the job you need it to do!

Camera companies are full of it. And sometimes it’s fine, 8 or 9 times out of 10 people select something that works. But, if you can spend the time to talk to an expert, an expert will not sell, and expert will ask and advise. Experts want to sell you what works, they cannot afford to sell you what doesn’t – you tend to tell people we’ve found out.

Consultative salespeople in the camera market understand how cameras compare and what to look at, marketing is just a guide to get you in. Beware, ask for more specs – if people do not respond to questions, then they don’t want your business.