Tyranny of the Small Hands

The other day Victoria and I went shopping for her father. He wanted a point-and-shoot camera for Christmas - not a difficult task. So we went to Best Buy and started looking at the two cameras they had.

I say two because, even though there were maybe fifteen different models from all different manufacturers, they were almost all the same size - too small. There was only one (the one we bought - a Canon of some sort) that was large enough for adults to use, and that only just barely.

What's the story here? The last time I went to buy a camera, it was my camera, which sort of sits in between point-and-shoot and a low end SLR. It is plenty big enough for adult hands, and features controls that are fairly simple to use. Those middle range cameras don't even exist anymore.

To be fair, the Canon also has simple controls, as I'm sure the others do. The problem is they all seem made for child sized fingers. Or specifically, Japanese teenage girl fingers. At least that's the impression I got from picking them up and trying them myself.

This makes no sense to me, and seems to be one of those times when the marketing departments at each of these firms got in bed with the engineers. Engineers love to push the boundaries. They love to go to the extremes. In the case of electronic devices, that means smaller. Apparently, the tiny-brained marketers seem to have agreed, and thus we have products for sale in America that are not made for Americans.

I think that's stupid. They would sell way more cameras if they'd make them just a bit bigger - say 5-8% in overall dimensions - and make the controls slightly bigger as well. That would certainly make these devices more comfortable for larger folks to use.

I mean I can't even imagine how a pro football player or someone who works with his hands for a living (say, a lumberjack or a fisherman) is supposed to operate one of these devices. I can barely do it, and though I have long fingers, they are fairly thin.

You know what'll happen, though. Someone will try to "fix" this and make a dumbed-down, featureless camera with giant buttons that looks like it was made for two-year-olds.

And that's equally stupid.