What's "compression"?
Many of the posts on this blog will describe painful situations with annoying customers. Others, however, will be rather philosophical musings on the nature of a retail job. Well, I guess not quite “philosophical”, but at least “thoughtful”, which can seem like “philosophical” when compared to how little thinking usually goes on regarding most things about this job. I.e., when all you do all day is tell people about cameras’ features, help them with simple digital tasks, and use the cash register, then occasionally asking “Why?” makes you seem like friggin’ Descartes.
So if the previous entry was all nice and thoughtful, I’ll have this one be one of the many upcoming “Customers Say The Stupidest Things” one.
You have no idea how many customers don’t know JPEG compression when they see it. Once a week or so you get someone who looks through their recently-printed pictures with a frown on their face, saying “digital pictures are just not as sharp as film, are they”. Of course, they’re flipping through digital pictures that looked like they were compressed down to 30k or so, with compression artifacts so big you can’t tell who’s who in the pictures. Every edge looks fuzzy and jagged, every high-contrast area loses all detail, every low-contrast area is a series of bands of colors. They honestly wonder why the pictures look like that. Apparently they don’t surf the net enough to know what a compressed, low-res picture looks like. I ask them about their compression settings, and they say something like “You mean that menu where, if you change it, you can fit more pictures in the card? Yeah, I may have changed that, but how was I supposed to know this would happen? Can you show me how to change it back? Is there any way to make the pictures sharper again?”. You mean, somehow invent information and detail that was not captured into your pictures? How’d you expect us to do THAT? Sure, I’ll reset your compression to “Fine”… “But they looked so nice on the little screen”… Yeah, that one-tenth-of-a-megapixel screen the size of a Cheez-it? You know, you can zoom into the picture on the screen to see how much detail you got, how sharp it is. Just press here to review it and press the “T” zoom button to zoom in… “Wow! I didn’t know THAT! That’s GREAT! Can you show me again, I gotta write this down…” Grrr…
posted by Remus
1 Comments:
I hate those kind of customers. While picking up some processed photos, I once had to wait behind some idiot for 20 minutes behind some idiot that wasn't able to fathom that turning the red-eye reduction on reduces red-eye.
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