It was always an assumption in my youth that you’ got what you paid for’ or ‘buy the most expensive you can afford’ and other folk sayings of that ilk.
Whilst many bemoan the increases in prices, petrol, electricity etc there is an area where value for money has gone in reverse........I speak of technology and gadgets.
The first Personal Computer made by IBM in the 80s cost as I recall about £7,000, probably nearer to £22,000 in today's money and only affordable by companies and organisations. Mr Sugar (he wasn’t a Lord then) broke the monopoly and introduced the Amstrad PC. It was still a major purchase, I believe from memory which is probably wrong, but Wikipedia confirms, .............. that the one I bought was c. £400, thats £900 in 2011 money, but the specification of todays £900 PC is so vastly better in all areas that comparisons are difficult. My Amstrad only had floppy disks, no hard drive, 512MB RAM and was in black & white, no one would buy that now at any price.
This line of thought was prompted by my buying a camcorder. I have actually never before owned one, but have many years experience in using video cameras in a professional manner to make ‘proper’ programs for training and communications mainly. This I did with Asda and later Derbyshire Constabulary where I established and managed in house video production units. Even in those days I saw the technologies get better frequently and accompanied by price stabilisation, if not drops.
But having spent some time researching available camcorders now, I was actually very surprised at what is available. There are really cheap units priced in tens of pounds, there are still semi pro kit in the thousands, but at the lower end of the scale. In between, where I settled in the hundreds, are a vast number of models, including the main manufacturers I was familiar with Sony, JVC, Panasonic.
I wanted some control over settings, as on cameras I was used to, things like focus, aperture to adjust depth of field, white balance etc. I got all that and more for £400.
However more surprises were in store, this shoots in full High Definition at 1080p, is completely solid state, no tapes ! storing this video on a memory card that costs £16 and it even has an optional 3D lens, so you can make your own ‘Avatar’.
It also has some fancy intelligent auto setting which means that the manual control I wanted is actually almost unnecessary.........and all of this is a small unit held in one hand and which records amazing quality images
That sort of kit, when I last was looking to spend someone else’s money on cameras, would have cost at least £6000 and probably nearer to £10,000 and that was only 5 years ago.
True the quality and value of the final output for a proper program still needs editing software, but then that is now available at £100 as opposed to £3,500.............and yes it does more as well.
I am doing a little project and now hope that my skills and experience in matters such as scripting, production planning, editing etc will still be relevant. We will see.
However my camcorder, only released in March has already been updated by several other models, which is one lesson of technology change. Yes you can probably save money by waiting but by the time you wait the world has moved on and whatever you buy will be obsolescent and will definitely be lacking in the features of today’s models.
This is also true in all sort of areas including cars, domestic appliances as well as computers and TVs and audio visual devices.
Now of course you don’t need to spend if you don’t need it, you don’t need to replace because its six months old, but there is some drive to have the best, specially when its price is beating inflation and going down. Not much else can do this, so maybe techie stuff can make you feel, just a little bit better off....................................or maybe its just me.
