Technological Regression

As somebody who makes a living by evaluating new technology, you might think I'd be a geek. In some ways, I am. I really enjoy looking at new gadgets, particularly if they embody some advance which makes them more useful than what we had before. There's a flip side to this road roller of advancement, though.

If this post makes me look like a grumpy old man, so be it, but there are several things about technology which were better when 'I were 'tlad' (never was good at accents). Take radios. I had a cheap, run-of-the-mill transistor FM radio, which could run on batteries or connected to the mains. Flick the On switch and there would be Radio 1, or before that Radios Caroline or London. Instantly.

On the 'Media Centre' I now use (I'm talking something the size of a ghetto-blaster, not an iPod) I have to use a remote. I have to wait for the machine to power up from standby and show me a menu on its 7-inch LCD screen. I have to select Radio and then the channel. It may only take 30 seconds or so, but I do this several times a day and its irritating (it's Radio 4 these days, must send for a POTBBC T-shirt).

It's worse with TV. To prove my techno-worth, and more importantly to save cash, I built a Media PC a couple of years back and run it into a digital projector. My TV may only be Standard Definition, but it does have a six-foot diagonal. The picture's good, but turning on the TV is a nightmare.

The PC runs Windows Vista (I'd need a new mainboard to install Windows 7) and takes about 90 seconds to start up and reach the main menu in Windows Media Center. For the next three or four minutes, it then responds to commands (from another remote) with the sensitivity of an elephant wearing earmuffs and boxing gloves. This is because it hasn't finished loading extraneous parts of Windows. Once it's done this, it starts looking around for any updates it can busy itself with. It may take an hour or more downloading these over our 470kbps 'broadband' connection, regularly interrupting viewing with pixellated or missed frames.

I know there are ways round this - add more memory, upgrade to Windows 7, turn off updates - but it seems to me it's another example of things being worse than they used to be. I had a Sony instant-on TV for 20 years which was just that; on as soon as you pressed the power button. There may have only been four channels to watch (material for another blog there), but you didn't miss the first two minutes of a programme if you switched on just as it started.

Then there's my digital camera. Actually, all my digital cameras (ones suppliers haven't picked up after review). All of them use LCD screens for framing shots. All are great indoors and pathetic outdoors, unless it's night or there's a typhoon approaching. The technology isn't there yet to produce an LCD screen which can compete with the brightness of the sun (though AMOLED may get close). So why remove the viewfinder?

This simple mechanism, requiring only a couple of lenses, meant you could instantly frame an image, in whatever light conditions, and see what you were shooting at. Simples, as the meerkats would have it. Instead, we put up with guessing at what we're looking at and hoping we haven't chopped off our loved ones most cherished parts. We are bending to the technology, rather than getting the tech companies to bend to what we want. Same with computerised TV. Same with 'Media' Radio. Why do we let them get away with it?