No one uses them all

Digital cameras, like calculators, have an immense menu of features.  It’s certainly rare, and possibly unknown, for anyone to use them all.  Why have them, then?

Our chief consultant writes:

Our tutoring consultant has noticed a number of students who are utterly dependent on their calculators, while knowing almost nothing about how to use them.  This is nothing new.  It was observed when digital calculators first displaced slide rules long ago, and in a sense predicted by a science-fiction story written when all computers were room-sized beasts.  Well, our man has taken it upon himself to work up a lesson on the use and pitfalls of these devices.  As background, he set himself to go through the users’ manual for the venerable TI-83, a dozen of which inhabit the tutoring center.  It is an old machine and most students have something newer, but the basic functions are very much the same.

The users’ manual is available free on line.  It now inhabits the Five Colors smartphone.  It is 827 pages long.

Some of the length is taken up with the index and the catalog of functions, which of course are not meant to be read through.  The pages are small, and contain much obvious material along the lines of, “to add two numbers, enter the first, press +, then the second, then =.”  But there’s still an immense mass of information.  Why?

Because the calculator can do so many things.  Statistics; operations on vectors and matrices (linear algebra); probability (several kinds of random number generators); complex numbers; numerical integration and differentiation; function, polar and parimetric graphing; much more, all in addition to the features that students actually use: the four basics (+, -, X, division), squares and square roots, trig functions.  Looking through the variety, it’s hard to imagine anyone making use of a significant fraction, much less all of them.  Certainly no students do.  Why, then are they there?

Our photographic consultant notes a similar phenomenon reported by digital photographers.  Digital cameras have an enormous number of menus, modes and settings, far more than any one person would actually use.  They’re there for the same reason as the features on a calculator.  First, it costs almost nothing to add a bit of software; second, if adding it attracts a single new customer, the company makes money.

When cameras were mostly mechanical, which features to add and how to fit them in was a difficult problem.  Light meters, range-finders, film-winders, everything took up space and required additional machining.  Deciding upon the market and working out what those photographers would need and want was a difficult balancing act.  What a new amateur would want, and be willing to pay for, varied immensely from what a photojournalist would demand.  So different cameras were produced with a different mix of features, at different prices.

Now, with features made of software that weighs nothing, takes up no space and costs nothing to duplicate, a camera can be stuffed full of what anyone might want.  Similarly, a calculator can include almost anything one might imagine.

Paradoxically, this means that most people actually use fewer features of their devices.  It’s safe to say than almost no one reads the TI-83 manual.  A few brave souls might search through it for something specific; most are put off by the sheer length.  This seems to be a general feature of the digital internet age: with much more variety to choose from, most of use stay in a small, well-known, safe region.  This is not a good thing.