Don't you love it? PPM, Mb/sec, dot pitch, gray-to-gray, interpolated, L2, rpm, ham and eggs, and the list is endless. Specs, specs and more specs, and hardly a real-world number in the bunch. I'm a little tired of meaningless specs that don't give me enough of an idea about what I really need to be spending my money on. I mean, do I really need to spend an extra two hundred bucks on a processor just so my spreadsheet calculates three seconds faster? It's like throwing a bucket of water into a pool: Is there more water? Sure. Can it be measured? Sure. Is it really noticeable, on a practical level? Of course not.
So it is with many of the product specs manufacturers beat us down with. When that spanking new "Blast-O-Max" USB hard drive boasts a 480Mb/sec transfer rate, isn't that just a theoretical maximum? What I really need to know is what I can actually expect in a real-world situation; in fact, the lowest transfer rate would be more helpful to me. And they don't even tell you what conditions would be required to get at that maximum. A pointless beat-down.
That 17 ppm printer speed looks great on paper, but the only paper I'm concerned about is what's coming out of that printer with my stuff on it. 17 ppm might be possible, if my documents have nothing on them but a title and a footer that displays the filename, but what if I have 80 lines of full-width text? Am I supposed to get more than 7 or 8 pages, because if so, something's wrong with my new printer!
All I'm saying is, give me something I can use. It sounds good that the aperture grille pitch on my monitor is .28, but if I had no idea of (1) what the heck that means, and (2) what's the industry average (which might be .24), then what good is it? And putting "lower is better" in parentheses is only partially helpful. I think products ought to specify what's the worst they do, not some theoretical maximum. That would be more useful. When you look at these mind-blowing specs, well, how to you even know they are mind-blowing? You first need to figure out what they mean before you start comparing. Then, some of them just trick you. I looked at an LCD monitor, right? Response time was like, 12 milliseconds and they had a big, yellow bubble on the page to show that. So, I then look at another and it's response time was 4 milliseconds, and it was about the same price. If I didn't know better, I'd have assumed that the spec didn't mean much. Instead I thought I'd better check into it, and I found that the 4 ms was gray-to-gray! I was like, Oh, a beat-down. That's like a guy saying he can run around the block in 2 minutes, and another coming in saying he can do it in one, and you come to realize that the latter is running a shorter block and isn't even covering the same distance as the former. Silly stuff, ain't it?
So, manufacturers really need to revamp this whole product spec thing and come up with a way of simply explaining how the thing performs in the real world, in a manner that can be compared directly with any other of the same product type. Until then, I guess we'll have to keep our helmets on.