I happened on a digital film-scanner demonstration the other day, by one of the big companies whose name I won't mention, but one of their scanners has "speed" in its title. Anyway, they'd lugged their complete scanner range, a high-end digital camera plus accessories, a photo-quality printer, and an entire display stand along to this exhibition, so portability obviously wasn't an issue, and yet they were trying to show off the performance of their scanner on a laptop computer!

Needless to say, its performance, along with the scanner's was less than "speedy", and the results on the LCD display looked less than impressive. What's even stranger is that the laptop must have cost twice as much as a fast desktop with a 19" monitor, and enough RAM to do the job.

The guy demonstrating couldn't match the colours properly on the crummy display, and if you could be bothered to wait for the 15 minutes it was taking to print out, the printed colours all had a red/magenta bias to them.

I must stress that this was a large, multinational Photo-digital company, with new products to show off, and they'd managed to come across like a bunch of amateurs. They must have lost far more customers than they gained with that exhibition.

Anybody else have any experiences of this sort of corporate crazy behaviour?

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), March 22, 2000

Answers

I don't think it has to do with the "corporation" being stupid, Pete. What I think you don't understand is that these are SALESPEOPLE demoing the gear, not R&D guys. The majority of the time the salesperson knows how to "operate" the product, but has little knowledge regarding really technical issues (And color calibration is a really technical issue). There are some who have a lengthy resume in imaging, and some that are "newbies". Also, most of the time the salespeople "share" a set of demo equipment between a good number of the sales staff, and often just recieve it a short period of time before the demo.

And this doesn't even begin to cover the computer nightmare. This rep who was demoing these scanners was using a laptop? Yeah, because it was probably HIS sales machine, set up for his/her daily regiment, NOT driving scanners.

Another thing, the products by the majority of these corporations cater these demos to practical aspects of image aquisition and processing. In the majority of instances, the guys doing the demos will be able to tell you scanner speeds, resolution, and logistics like that, but probably won't know the dark current of the CCD chip in electrons/pixel/second.

Do you see what I'm getting at here? Do you know how difficult it is to set up a SET of scanners, a digital camera, and a digital photo- printer, correctly calibrated and fine tuned for near perfect output? If you do, imagine trying to do this on the road, with NO ICC calibration devices, or spectrophotometers, a different laptop and salesman each time.

My point is.....these demostrations, while useful, are seldom a perfect representation of the product. You can't base an evaluation of a product simply on a demo. I've run into many salesmen like this in the biomedical imaging field. I've bought many excellent products after a demos that didn't impress me much, but after I had a chance to evaluate for myself, the real capabilites shine through.

The moral of the story, don't judge a book by its cover.

-Jason

-- Jason M. Kirk (jasonkirkphoto@hotmail.com), March 22, 2000.

I guess you have to just look past certain circumstances, usually you can tell a good piece of gear by watching it run, most crappy gear either A. Feels crappy B. Sounds crappy C. Has crappy output. I wouldn't worry to much about a slight color cast on an uncalibrated system, if the hardware is there, you can generally work around the shortcomings of a demo piece. There isn't a scanner or camera in existence that couldn't be improved upon.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), March 22, 2000.