If you're looking at buying a new piece of equipment, you will likely just look at the spec sheet and compare it to something similar. But even the numbers don't tell the full story.
This issue isn't exclusive to photography — far from it — almost every type of product will have some marketing intervention in the spec sheet to repackage a less than appealing number into something more impressive. That is, usually changing something understandable and unimpressive into something confusing. One strong example of this is the MPG in a car. You will often see a maximum MPG which is created very carefully on motorways or highways at the optimum number of revs and so on. (Side note: it used to be much worse than this but now the figures have to be more or less recreatable to stop manufacturers taking their cars into some windless aerodrome for ridiculous numbers.) The "combined" figure is usually the most accurate, but even that will be tough to replicate for many cars.
The photography industry has many similar misleading stats on spec sheets, some are just as famous as MPG in cars, and some are lesser-known. One of the most famous is, of course, megapixels. There are so many important factors to consider that influence the quality of an image, that a 12-megapixel camera can produce sharper images than a camera with more than 3-times that. However, the stat that irks me the most is one I was glad to see the Northrups brought up: the number of screen dots. Perhaps there is a good reason to discuss the number of dots on a screen that is too nuanced for me to know, but it just seems absurdly misleading to me. My Sony camera's rear screen has 920,000 dots which is impressive. That is until you realize my mobile phone has over 10,000,000 dots.
What spec do you find to be the most misleading?
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