At that distance, "if there's a problem with the part, I can't just get in the car and drive over there," West says, "and they can't come here to see what I'm talking about." So when questions arose, West had no choice but to send the part to California and then wait three to four days for its return. Those delays cost the company thousands of dollars in downtime. "While we're waiting for an answer, we can't continue to make this part or go on to another part," West says. Although he had no experience with digital cameras, West figured he could use such a tool to take up-to-the-minute photos of his part in progress and E-mail the images instantly to the other coast.
West chose to do his product research on the Internet. He started by visiting the camera manufacturers' sites and then conducted keyword searches for bulletin-board forums. While the latter shed some light on how the different models worked in the real world, "I took that information with a grain of salt," he says. "Anyone can post anything on the Internet, and people could easily blame the camera for a problem when they were really just doing something wrong." But the forums alerted him to the Sony Mavica, whose owners tended to be fiercely loyal.
West was practically sold on the spot by the camera's use of floppy disks. Its design bypasses the entire cable-connecting and downloading process, which West believed would save him precious minutes. "That's the way these cameras should be built," says West. "I don't want to be busy downloading when I'm trying to convey information rapidly." Once mastered, downloading a few pictures via cable can take less than five minutes, but transferring highly detailed images or a large number of shots can stretch the waiting period to half an hour.
And although its capacity may seem puny in comparison with that of Iomega's Zip drive, the lowly diskette holds its own in the world of digital cameras. A diskette's capacity is comparable with about 2MB of memory--the standard for cameras in the Mavica's price range. That translates into a storage capacity of 15 to 20 images in "normal" mode and about half that number in "fine" mode. The actual number of pictures any digital camera can store depends on the total available memory, the complexity of the image, and the compression level. By contrast, Oglesby's Kodak DC120 can hold only two images in its highest-quality "superfine" setting and 20 images in the unit's standard 2MB of memory.
West's next step was to get his hands on a Mavica. In two Staples stores he played with the unit and compared it with half a dozen other models. With his manufacturing background, he was particularly impressed by the product's fit and finish. "Kind of a stocky little thing," he remembers thinking the first time he handled the camera. "I thought it was solid, very well put together."
Image quality wasn't a big deal to West, who, unlike Oglesby, would be taking almost exclusively indoor, one-subject photos that wouldn't need enlarging. The Mavica's resolution suited him just fine compared with that of the other models he looked at, including cameras made by Casio, Olympus, and Kodak. What's more, he knew that the Mavica saved the images in JPEG format, the industry standard, as a default. That would make it easy for anybody to view the images with a standard graphic-design program or Internet browser. And when he compared the LCD panels used to display recorded pictures, West found that "Sony's colors were more accurate, more realistic" than others in its class. "There was no comparison," he says.
Unfortunately, by the time West was ready to buy, he "had a hard time finding the Mavica in stock," he says. He consulted several stores and catalogs and got the same story from each: Mavicas were hard to come by. Finally, on a business trip to Los Angeles, West made a pit stop at Fry's Electronics, a local computer store, and struck gold. He selected the Sony Mavica MVC-FD7, which unlike the similar Sony Mavica MVC-FD5 has a zoom lens. The camera set him back $650; before beginning his research he had expected to spend about $500.
The next day, while he was still in Los Angeles, West took photos of some complex tooling to bring home to his engineers. Although he didn't have an Internet connection for the 24-hour trip, he did have his laptop computer. That night in his hotel room he used Microsoft Publisher to prepare a trip report complete with embedded images of the products. He also experimented with the camera, shooting an ashtray, a pen, and a can of soda. "I was really amazed," he says. "You could read the ingredients on the label of the can."
Back at home, West says the Mavica is doing what it's supposed to do: helping him resolve questions with customers more quickly. "You can just pop that diskette out and put it in a regular PC and have your image traveling on the Internet in minutes," he says. Even when everything is going right, West still uses the camera to provide weekly updates to clients over the Net.
And both West and Oglesby are finding additional uses for their cameras. Oglesby is attaching images of his inventory to a Microsoft Access database to save for insurance purposes and to enable his office staff and field superintendents to easily track down equipment, such as field computers. And West Manufacturing now shoots each completed prototype as it goes out the door. The best of those images will be uploaded to the company's Web site, which was scheduled to be up and running this month. What better way to attract customers than to show them what you can do?
Mie-Yun Lee is editorial director and founder of BuyersZone, an Internet buying service that features expert purchasing advice and tools for small and midsize businesses. For a digital version of the decision-making process described here, check out www.buyerszone.com/digicam/incsearch.html.
