Shownotes:

* Michael Outlines the battle between Quality & Convenience using real world examples – 0:18

* Speed usually beats perfection – 13:42

 

Good morning everyone. Michael the Maven here. Today we are going to be talking about Quality vs. Convenience. This is another chapter that’s painfully removed from “Efficiency Playbook” simply because I didn’t feel it really fit into the tactics that I was giving. It’s more of an observation in something I wanted my readers to be aware of but it was something definitely I wanted to do a follow up with.

The easiest example I can give you is because I’m a photographer; in the photography world over the past few years, we have seen just this huge uprising of the smartphone. The smartphones have essentially killed off the point and shoot cameras that we used to buy; those little cameras that we put in our pockets or purses, maybe the size of a wallet or something like that. They’ve pretty much killed those off because we have cameras built into our smartphones and we don’t need to carry this little camera around anymore; that market essentially died.

The question then becomes, how is the quality of a smartphone photo? If you go and you ask a professional photographer or Michael the Maven, what would he tell you? I will tell right off the bat, the quality is nothing like a full frame camera. It’s because of the sensor size. There are physical limits of a small sensor; that’s not to say that the small sensor hasn’t improved, it definitely has improved in quality. If you were to take that same technology and put it in the big sensor, the physical size of a large sensor plays a very important role in the creation of a digital image. Right off the bat, something you probably notice is that, if you try to use your smartphone or a cellphone to take a picture in a very dark environment, it really struggles with something we call noise. This is the grime that you see where everything is kind of pixelated and muddy. It just doesn’t look very good. This is a physical limit of a small sensor. It is not absorbing as much light as something that a large full frame sensor would to the physical surface area. It runs into problems with the interpolations of colors and noise reduction. The more light that you have coming into your sensor; the higher signal to noise ratio. Therefore, right off the bat, small sensors struggle in low light and probably always will. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is something that we refer to as bokeh. This is a background blur in our images; very small sensors have a much deeper depth of fields. If you have large sensor your relative depth of field for the same type of lens in terms of the aperture of bokeh length are going to be a lot more blurry. This is something artistic that most photographers want in their portraits and it gives a very pleasing optical blurred to the background.

What’s happening now, these companies like Apple are putting software into the smartphones to create this fake blur; the digital blur to soften up the image. I don’t think it looks very good, it will probably improve over time. I do think that software wise eventually it will be figured out. I think that is something that solvable. I don’t think that the low light thing is very solvable as the small sensor, not anytime soon at least because of the limited physics but the software stuff; I think they’re going to figure that out to make it look really pleasing.

The third thing we run into; the third problem is the lens issues. There’s certain defect in lenses and there are certain problems with constructing very small lenses such as continuance that you see the size like a green pea or smaller; that is typically a wide angle lens. Anywhere from twenty-two to thirty millimeters in terms of the focal length and that is not the focal length you want to use to take a portrait.