In The New York Times Magazine: The Flip camcorder

FLIPPED OUT
Convenience makes a good-enough camcorder a hit

In Consumed this week, an object lesson in the awesome power of convenience — and when it trumps quality itself.

In the consumer-products world, progress can be gauged in measurable increments of improved quality. Contemporary consumers demand such improvements all the time and refuse to compromise on the good-enough when the better is available. So marketplace success depends on quality breakthroughs: tastier coffee, faster computers, smoother-riding cars. This is always true — except when it isn’t….

A high-enough degree of convenience is exactly what makes a “good enough” product consumable. Digital-compression formats like the MP3 and most of its successors have entailed a step down in audio quality — but for most listeners, they’re “good enough” when you consider that they’re obtainable instantly (and, often, free). As Fleming-Wood points out, the camera business went through its own version of this epiphany decades ago, with the rise of one-button devices that couldn’t possibly match the quality of single-lens-reflex cameras but were far more accessible….

Read the column in the May 25, 2008 issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.

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