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Get What You Pay For

Entry 793, on 2008-06-13 at 17:27:38 (Rating 2, Computers)

Two recent issues made me think about the idea of quality and whether its worth paying more for something which is "better" than a similar cheaper item. The first was my experience with the two cameras I brought with me to San Francisco, and the second was the old perennial favourite: Macs versus PCs.

I have a nice Canon digital SLR with a collection of lenses which I use for most photography, but I wanted to carry only one bag most of the time with me on this trip so I also brought a Sony compact digital camera which easily fitted into my computer bag (which I use as my hand luggage on flights, etc). When I got here I spent half a day walking around the city taking photos with the dSLR and the results were really nice.

Then I took some more casual photos with the Sony and I was horrified to see what poor quality they were. Actually, many people might not have complained about them, but to me they were nowhere near as sharp as the Canon's results, suffered from serious colour fringing around bright objects, and had significant noise in darker areas. None of these things would have been serious to a lot of people but I like using light in interesting ways and that often does show deficiencies in the lens especially.

I would expect that a $1200 dSLR would outperform a $400 compact camera of course, but I was surprised at how obvious it was. Another point was that I was mainly using my cheapest, nastiest lens on the Canon and even that destroyed the compact camera in terms of image quality.

So what about Macs and PCs? The subject was discussed on a newspaper web site recently and I noticed an interesting trend in the discussion from Mac and PC proponents. The Mac people argued that the Mac had better hardware and software. In other words, they were arguing that they use Macs because of quality.

But what about the PC people? Well I didn't read any postings which said PCs were better. They concentrated more on ideas such as PCs being cheaper (they are, but usually not by much), on PCs being more widely used (that's true, but so what?), and PCs having more software (that's true to an extent but are no major software categories I can think of where there is no good Mac alternative).

So the PC people seem to have given up on the idea of PCs being better - maybe its clear to everyone now that they are not. Instead of arguing on this basis they resort to PCs being cheaper, more common, and being the unofficial standard. Well that's OK, but I prefer to use something that's better, not cheaper, so I'll stick to my Mac.

Comment 1 (1463) by Andrew on 2008-06-18 at 14:43:44:

Hmmm macs are more expensive by around $400 (and sadly they just run Office/email/internet)
I'm comparing something like a Dell Optiplex 755 to a 20 inch iMac. It gets really terrible when someone just "has to" have a Macbook Pro.

Isn't there a problem with silly Windows only apps such as financial packages. Finance One, for example, has resulted in many Parallels installs.

Comment 2 (1464) by OJB on 2008-06-18 at 21:33:41:

The price difference depends on the particular models you compare, but the whole point I was making is that its worth the extra. There's also the extra cost with PCs for anti-virus software, extra support, and buying software which is standard on the Mac which you might not have considered.

The silly Windows-only apps are a problem but that is happening less now that the Mac is more popular, and software writers are realising they need to take the Mac seriously. I often find people moving from PC to Mac insist on having Windows capability on their new Mac but then find they never need it.

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