The smallest cameras in the world

August 11, 2009 8:23 pm admin Website Accuracy

It’s not easy to get it perfect on websites and mistakes sometimes slip through.  But is there really any excuse when you’re a big company who should have some sort of quality checking in place?

Searching for a present recently (a digital camera), I had one particular need in mind – that the camera had a cost of about £100 and it had dimensions small enough to fit in the pocket.  I certainly found that but it appeared that the cameras were a bit TOO small.  In fact, probably record-beating.

I was on the Comet website and I’d narrowed down to the £50-100 price range and started looking through the cameras.  First to look at was the Samsung L301 Black.  I clicked on the specification tab to see the dimensions of the camera, which took me to the page (which will probably be a dead page in no time) of http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/530085/SAMSUNG-L301-BLACK/tab/specification.   The dimensions were certainly small, coming in at 1.0×1.0×1.0(H/W/D)cm, as you can see from the screenshot below:

 

That’s quite an impressive camera to have 1×1x1 cm dimensions but have a 2.7 inch LCD screen.  It’s also worth noting that it didn’t appear to have an Megapixels, which would be kind of worrying in a digital camera.

So I kept looking and guess what?  Comet had more the same camera in pink – with the same dimensions.

Looking at another model (the Samsung ES57 Silver and also Pink) there was the same 1×1x1 dimensions.  I dug deeper and discovered that all the Samsung cameras had the same dimensions displaying.  

For awhile I thought that Comet had perhaps got wind of an impending influx of pygmies to the UK and had stocked cameras perfect for their tiny pockets.   But then I realised it was just poor attention to detail, further emphasised by the Megapixels box in the specifications screen of every single camera on the site, which displayed as:

 

So what does this all mean?   It certainly means that whoever was responsible for uploading the details of the Samsung cameras should be shot.   It also means that Comet probably don’t analyse their website statistics in much detail because if they did then they may have found that for at least the past 5 days the problems have been there, which will be having a negative impact on the potential of people to buy the cameras?

What’s of most importance though, is that my interest was in looking at the camera dimensions before anything else and because I couldn’t find what I wanted, I went and bought elsewhere, via a website that actually had the correct information.   That site also had descriptions next to the Megapixels box instead of that X, which makes me automatically think of them next time I want to make a purchase and leaves me wondering how long it will be before Comet realise their oversights and make the necessary changes.