EEVblog #28 - Product design drives me NUTS!

Dave goes nuts over dodgy product design decisions in Canon DV camcorders, Fluke multimeters, Timex watches, Princeton Tec LED lights, and PVR's.
And how cool would it be to design farting gnomes?

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• product
• design
• decisons
• bad
• good
• canon
• dv
• camcorder
• fluke
• multimeter
• timex
• watch
• princeton
• tes
• led
• light
• pvr
• digicrystal
• novelty
• gadgets
• spankometer

[gishidenki]

I can't agree more on the blue LEDs. It seems there's an unwritten law forbidding to use other colors (or less intensity) for power on indicators.

One thing on Casio calculators: Why on earth did they decide to put Pi and Exp on the same freeking button?! These keys are vital to an electronics engineer. They should be both accessible without shifting. But then again, the HYP-Key is of course muuuch more important than these two...

[EEVblog]

@gishidenki To Casio's credit, the PI key works without shifting before number entry starts, so it's rather a clever combination I think.

[CureGrey]

Dude, you seriously need to chill out. You look pretty crazy and wild-eyed.

Does the HYP key really bother you that much? I've never used it, but would assume there must be people that do if it's on calculators from every maker.

[EEVblog]

Dude, you seriously need to get a sense of humor!

The uselessness of the primary HYP key is universally lauded.

[Afrotechmods]

5 stars for mentioning Back to the Future

[EEVblog]

That's my 2nd BTTF reference in the blog so far, I'm not obsessed, really...

[fingerboy18]

Sometimes you gotta laugh. Who the he'll thought of the ideas? All of us engineers make mistakes, but these are important things!

I wonder what the engineers at a sex toy manufacturer do? Sounds somewhat disturbing. That'll be a fun bit for the resume.

[thenaimis]

I had to go check my own Panasonic camcorder and sure enough it does the exact same thing. Even more fun, it swaps the image left to right if I press the physical menu buttons on the display. I am no fan of princeton tec lights. Their dive light I bought was hopelessly short lived. Another brand, UK, produced a light that put the reflector in contact with another metal, resulting in guaranteed delamination of the reflector. Three returns later, they stopped using the reflective coating.

[Intosia]

Talking about blue led, the Berhinger mixer, it has NO powerswitch(!) and a bright blue led thats always on! I use it as a nightlight to light my room. Its insane!

[insonicbloom]

I have to echo the blue light thing here I suffer from extreme migraines and one thing that is sure to cause one is bright lights anyway about 2 weeks ago I bought myself a Bugera 6262 amplifier which has 2 of these "jewel lights" on it anyway as it is a head amplifier it sits on 2 cabs which put it at face height - well I'm sure you can see where this is going I turned it on and was blinded for about 10 mins with dam light spots in my eyes by these crazy bright blue lights! good amp though!

[sdbvideo]

They do that becouse someone is likely going to use it like you do, from a distrance.

And to make shore you can see as much of what your filming as possible they hide the extra info.

But they probleably shouldn't make the dessision for the user, as it is in many products.

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The same counts for manuals, they are higly unlogical most of the time.

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Anyways, i really enjoy whatching the video's, please keep it going!!

[CoolDudeClem]

My cameras' quality bugs me, I don't know why they insist on using these CMOS image sensors where you need to be on the surface of the sun to have just enough light to film something, the pictures often grainy, plus anything moving appears to skew. What's wrong with using the good ol' CCD type? The sound although not terrible, is not great either, I actually set up a separate microphone and tape recorder recording simultaneously when I do my videos.

[zymurgic]

Philips PVR and consumer electronics with laggy interfaces : I press a button on the remote, I expect at least some confirmation that the machine has accepted the command before spending over a minute rummaging around some godawful data structure in its internal files to give a list of recordings. Seriously. The machine typically holds about 50 recordings. What's so hard about displaying a listing of 50 recordings?