8 Products That Don't Actually Do Anything

There’s no denying that America is a nation that loves to consume and we have the waistlines to prove it.  We consume energy, food, soap and mindless entertainment at a pace that dwarfs virtually every other civilized nation.  So great is our love for buying stuff that we don’t even demand that it does anything.  Very often the fact that a product or service exists is plenty of proof to us that we need it.

Yeah, the alcohol.  That's what made vodka suck...

Now, I could go the easy route and talk about the nonsense you see on television late at night but I think most rational consumers know better than to trust the guy behind the “Magic Bullet”.  Instead I’m going to go the more controversial route and talk about some extraordinarily ubiquitous things that produce millions of dollars of profit every year.

Before we get started, let me offer the caveat that nobody likes being told they’re flushing their money down the toilet.  Armed with the information below you will no doubt be tempted to point out to a friend or coworker that they are buying into a scam.  Don’t be surprised if they neglect to thank you… or even trust you.  Many people will defend their poor buying choices even once confronted with scientific proof that the product is more worthless than Lady Gaga’s stylist.  Add to that the fact that the companies behind these products have an obvious interest in keeping you in the dark and you have a recipe for rampant and self-perpetuating fraud.

But I’m sure you are too smart to fall for things like…

 #1: Airborne

Anybody who travels or lingers in drug stores knows about this one.  This little orange tablet promises to keep the germs away (or, rather, carefully avoids directly inferring that while making it clear that that’s what they want you to think it does) just by dissolving it in water and taking a drink when you feel the germs coming on.  Heck, you can even take it before you get a cold and it will bolster your immune system just in case.

Person who lingers in drug stores.

And never mind the fact that on the bottom of the package in miniscule print it says that it is not intended to treat, diagnose, prevent or cure any disease.  That’s just the legal stuff, right?  Well, yeah.  They are legally required to put that on the package because it doesn’t actually cure, treat or prevent anything. 

Airborne has recently undergone a legally imposed packaging design that makes the intended purpose of the product even more vague.  The package does say that their claims have not been evaluated by the FDA but they neglect to mention that those parties that did look into it found consistently that it had no measurable effect at all.

Even when confronted with this fact, many people swear by it.  “I took it once when I wasn’t sick,” they’ll tell you, “And I didn’t get sick!”  People can fool themselves into believing all sorts of snake oil remedies are actually working.  It’s called the placebo effect and we learn about it in junior high or when we read Stephen King’s “It”, whichever comes first.

You remember that part, right?  With the inhaler?

Even if they break down and accept that it can’t cure or prevent anything, they’ll still insist it has to be good for your immune system because it has stuff like Echinacea and Vitamin C.  Well, as it turns out, taking Echinacea and vitamin C also don’t positively affect your immune system either, but they won’t believe that, trust me.

As a last ditch effort, they will turn to what the package tells them.  The box proudly proclaims that the product was invented by a schoolteacher.  Not to disparage schoolteachers or anything, but are they the ones usually making the medical breakthroughs?

 #2: Freecreditreport (dot) com

That’s right… I offer them no back link.  They’ll get no Pagerank from me and that’s because their whole corporate model is a fraud from the start.  Well, actually it’s because I still have the damn pirate song stuck in my head, but that’s beside the point.

This company offers you something that is free (your credit report) to begin with.  They tell you they’ll give it to you for free, which you accept because you probably know that the law requires that you have free annual access to your credit report.  Of course, they actually give you only one-third of your credit report, they make no guarantee that the information is current and it isn’t free.

But they do have really catchy jingles.

Catchy jingle or no, I still want to punch him.

The fact that they have a deceptive business model is not enough to get on this list.  Technically speaking they do what the fine print says they’ll do.  But what makes Free Credit Report dot Com’s business model so (criminally) deceptive is the fact that they sell the service as though it somehow protects you against identity theft.  It won’t of course, even if you buy the deluxe package.

But the friendly dude with the guitar and the disarming smile warned us that we were a hair’s breadth away from being forced into involuntary seafood servitude and renaissance devil-sticking if we didn’t check their website immediately.  Interesting that they choose to treat these professions as though they are somehow otherwise reserved for lepers considering that their core demographic of potential customer is very likely to be waiters or waitresses.

Now, you’ll note that even though those irritating jingles are still echoing in your ears, the commercials are gone.  They’ve been forced to shut their doors, refund scads of money and discontinue business altogether.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one complaining.  Of course, all they did was change their name, rewrite slightly less deceptive copy and start again, but hey, that’s why you hired me.

 #3: Anti-Bacterial Cleansers

You see them everywhere now.  Antibacterial everythings.  It’s gotten to the point that a mother feels neglectful if she isn’t wiping antibacterial tissues over the container the antibacterial tissues came in.  It seems that you couldn’t find a bacterium if you wanted to in many homes.

Or could you?  There is ample evidence to suggest that the majority of people don’t let the antibacterial agents stay in place long enough (two minutes) for them to have any real effect before wiping them back off.  Studies are mixed on the actual bacteria killing properties of these wipes.  But that misses the point altogether.

There is no reason in the world to believe that living in a bacteria free environment is healthy.

In fact, quite the opposite is true.  The overwhelming majority of bacteria we encounter everyday are benign or helpful.  Wiping away all the bacteria is akin to burning down the house because there was a mouse in it.  Maybe.

I bet you didn't even know bacteria could smile, did you?

Now, many will argue that the antibacterial wipes are simply easier to use.  They come presoaked in cleaners so you can just swipe one of the disposable wipes out of the disposable package and save yourself the trouble of spritzing a few molecules of Windex or the equally effective soapy water first. 

Never mind the environmental no-nos that occur here, the fact is that you are actually buying an inferior product for a radically inflated price.  The wipes and the cleaner are literally one-fifth the cost if you buy them separately.  There’s also less waste since nothing has to come in a massive plastic tub to make the purchase price seem sensible. 

 #4: Chiropractors

So am I ruffling any feathers yet?  But Aaron, you say, I’ve been to a chiropractor, he did wonders for my back pain.  My mother swears by her chiropractor.  My uncle/aunt/cousin/milkman/neighbor’s weasel removal specialist tells me it’s worth every penny.

I will say it loudly and proudly, “chiropractors are a scam”.  Every credible scientific study that has ever looked into this has concluded that the whole chiropractic “art” is nothing more than an uncomfortable massage.

Evidence that Chiropractors are full of it.

Like the products before this one, this is a service that relies on the “perceived threat reduction” scam.  Airborne tells you if you take it, you won’t get sick.  You take it, you don’t get sick.  Of course, you also ate three tic-tacs and petted two Pomeranians and didn’t get sick, but you don’t connect the two because tic-tacs and Pomeranians weren’t invented by schoolteachers.  The crooning credit phony tells you if you subscribe to his “free” service you won’t be a victim of identity theft.  You oblige and “bam”, no identity theft.  Of course, the chance that you would be a victim of identity theft was vanishingly small to begin with, but you don’t connect the two because random happenstance doesn’t have a catchy jingle with inconsistent rhymes.  You slather your home with lemony smelling antibiotics and suddenly your child continues to not have diphtheria.

Chiropractors are the worst offenders on my list so far because they bilk the insurance system from time to time, forcing those of us who know their operation is a scam to indirectly fund it.

As a general rule, be suspicious of any service that tells you that once you start coming you have to keep coming back for the rest of your life.  This might be true of some chronic, life altering ailments, but it is very rarely the case with achy backs.

 #5: Herbal Supplements

Yes, all of them.

It’s pretty simple, really.  As long as you include the words “these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA.  This product is not intended to prevent, cure, diagnose or treat any disease” on the outside of a package, you can pretty much use the rest of the package to say whatever the hell you want.

No surprise then that there’s an herbal supplement for every condition known to humankind, especially the ones that have baffled science for centuries.  Alcoholism, sexual arousal, baldness, fatness, shortness, attention span, memory, penis enlargement… all no match for naturally occurring plants and minerals that science refuses to accept the overwhelming power of.

Just look at this thing and tell me it doesn't
cure melanoma.

Of course, we’re meant to believe that the medical industry suppresses these natural cure-alls because they would go out of business if only we knew that we could cure our spinal meningitis with aloe and orchids.

As tempting as this fantasy is, think about the size of this purported conspiracy.  Every medical researcher in the world would essentially have to be in on it.  Even if you buy into the myth that everybody who works for a pharmaceutical company is devil-spawn (notice I couldn’t find a link to refute that one), it’s hard to believe that all the University sponsored medical researchers are in on it as well.  We’re talking about brilliant scientists that devote their lives and futures to finding cures and treatments instead of taking higher paying jobs in the medical field.  Would all of them be willing to sell their souls to the Illuminati?

Oh wait... yeah, that's all of them.  Never mind.

Strangely enough, the only scientists that side with the herbal supplements work for the herbal supplement industry.  I guess by yelling “conspiracy” loud enough they hope they can make us forget that they’re the ones conspiring.

 #6: Debt Consolidation Services

This fraud is so blatant it should be illegal and thankfully, it is slowly becoming so in some parts of the country.  These are the commercials that seem to fall somewhere between the aforementioned “identity theft protection” commercials and the bankruptcy attorneys.

They promise to “stop the harassing calls”, “consolidate your debts into one low monthly payment” and “settle for pennies on the dollar”.  And technically, they (might) do all of those things.  Of course, you could do the same thing by shutting off your phone and forgetting about your debts without doing any more damage to your credit rating.

An alternative way to stop the annoying calls.

While the industry will obviously defend itself against claims of fraud, it is clear that they’re implying somewhere in their advertisements that they will help you get your financial house in order.  I’m sure it’s somewhere in the fine print there, but I’ll save you the eye strain: they won’t.

You see, step one in their process is to stop paying your bills altogether.  Obviously you can’t afford a bunch of recurring monthly debts, so they’ll tell you not to send the little pittance you might have already been sending.  Oh wait, I’m sorry, step one is that you start paying them a recurring monthly fee.  Then stop paying all of your other bills.  After all, they want you to keep you priorities straight.

While you’re busy paying them and nobody else, they’re supposedly hard at work talking with your creditors and trying to convince them to reduce your debt load.  There’s no magical formula to this, of course.  You could do the same thing and you’d probably meet with better results since collection agents hate these companies.  There’s also no guarantee that the creditor will reduce your debt at all.  They’re under no legal obligation to do so.  You’ll notice that in the microsecond of fine print at the bottom of the commercial in the blurry font.

Meanwhile, your unpaid debt is mounting.  Your credit rate is being decimated which is probably the opposite of what you had in mind.  You’re accumulating interest and late fees that weren’t piling up before.  By the time your debt collection agency is done working their magic, you might have paid them more than they saved you.

And, of course, your credit would have been better if you’d declared bankruptcy… or invested all your money in recreational guillotine rentals.

 #7: Radar Detectors

You know all about these guys, right?  They sit on the dash of fast cars with fast drivers and beep annoyingly to tell you that there might be a cop up ahead.  Or there might not be.  It might just be a Wal-Mart.  But it might be a cop.  And you might never know what it was.  Assuming it was anything at all, that is.

So what could possibly be wrong with this license to fly?

First, let me tell you what’s not wrong with it.  There’s a persistent rumor that by the time a car reaches the range of the radar detector it is already in the range of the radar.  That suggests that the cop will already have you pegged before you know he’s around.  Now this is actually usually true, but for a different reason altogether.

Might I suggest a distraction tactic?

Hold on to your seats here, folks.  Turns out that the cops have actually seen these radar detector things before.  In fact, they even have radar detector detectors.  I think they even call them that.  The technology has been around for a while and when it came out it was actually pretty effective.  The longer it exists, the less functional they are.

See, modern radar guns (or the increasingly common Lidar guns) don’t emit any signal at all until they select a target and fire.  This means that there is, at most, a few milliseconds between the time you get your heads up and the time the cop gets enough info to give you that ticket.  That means that the only times a radar detector has any real utility is when the cop is hitting the guys in front of you.  Your radar detector might pick up on the band’s intermittent signal and give you enough forewarning to avoid the ticket.

That might seem like justification to buy one until you give it some real thought.  People ahead of you are generally not going slower than you.  They’ll be going faster or the same speed, which means you probably would have noticed the cop when he pulled over the other guy. 

To make matters worse, in some municipalities these things are illegal.  You might be as likely to get a ticket as to avoid one.

On top of that is the underreported fact that speeding is literally one of the leading causes of accidental death in this country.  Not to make a bummer out of this blog, but the radar detector can’t help you much with the tangled wreckage of a hairpin curve at sixty miles per hour.

Radar detector or no, this dude is getting a ticket.

 #8: Organic Food

So I saved the best for last.  I’m sure this one will ruffle some feathers but it has to be included on the list.  Organic food is a pretty incredible scam.  It is an inferior product that cost more money and it is spreading like wild fire.

You can hardly blame people for being taken in by this.  It just seems like natural should be healthier than synthetic.  So we buy produce with no pesticides, meat grown with no hormones and milk made with no… whatever it is the other guys put in their milk.  After all, if it’s natural, it must be healthier right?  That’s why people in prehistoric times lived so much longer than us right?

Let’s clear this one up right now.  Natural does not equal healthy.  Arsenic is natural.  Sodium is natural.  The cold vacuum of space is natural.  None of them will make your milk drinking experience any healthier.

Fully organic or no, I'm not eating it.

There is a huge amount of data on this subject and it can be overwhelming to get a clear answer on the question of organics.  There is an enormous amount of misinformation out there and it is hard for the layperson to sift through what is woo and what is science.  Rest assured, though, that mountains of unbiased data confirm again and again that there is no nutritional superiority to organic foods.

Not all people who buy organic do it only for the lack of artificial sweeteners and hormones, of course.  Many choose free-range eggs and cruelty free meats and dairy products and generally those will also be organic.  This isn’t because there is any correlation between organic and being nice to the animals, it’s a simple matter of an overlapping market.

But the vast majority of people buy into the naturalistic fallacy that suggests that the pesticides, hormones, preservatives and additives are just bad.  Never mind that most of these things are added because they make the product healthier, they have really hard to pronounce names so they can’t be good.

The common thread to all of these products and services is the lingering element of fear that goes along with them.  Whether they fan the fear of germs, identity thieves, chronic untreatable pain, inferior phallic size, speeding tickets, debt collectors, preservatives or jobs at pirate themed restaurants, the key is that they’ve made us afraid of something we don’t completely understand.

GNC has just the thing for that.

Once they’ve framed our fear in a confusing enough way, they present the magic bullet that will cure the problem.  The prices are pretty low on everything except the chiropractors so we largely decide that we’re better safe than sorry.  We spend a few extra bucks on the organic milk instead of the regular stuff.  We pay the seven bucks a month for our increasingly misrepresented free credit report and we take a myriad of colorful placebos that do little more than alter the color of our urine.

If people weren’t raking in billions of dollars on this it would just be kind of funny, like a superstitious grandpa and his lucky socks.  As it stands, sales of Airborne alone totaled in excess of a hundred million dollars last year.  And this was after it was forced to remove the word ‘cold’ from its packaging.

So how can you know what is real and what isn’t?  How can you tell what products do what they promise?  There are several very good websites that will offer you impartial facts.  Never Google “does [name of product] really work?” because the company will own the hell out of that question.  It’s better to start assuming the worst and Google “[name of product] is a scam”.  Or you could just place your unwavering trust in me, which is equally effective.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, passing this blog along to all your facebook friends will make you thin, unbald, sexy, smart and better able to do complex arithmetic*.

*This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.  This blog is not intended to prevent, diagnose, treat or cure any disease.

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

8 Reasons to Not Die

If you’ve been considering dying recently, I strongly urge against it.  First of all, it’s far more expensive than you think.  But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it turns out that you’ve selected an unbelievably cool time to be alive.

This exists.  The future will look even cooler.

Science is moving so fast now that we’ve almost become numb to the pace of innovation.  Every few months a new revolution in consumer technology appears.  It seems in the past ten years we’ve experienced more breakthroughs than we saw in the previous fifty.  Of course, that half-century had already seen more breakthroughs than the human race managed in a quarter of a millennia so it seems fair to say that there is something of an exponential increase going on here.

So what wonders lurk beyond the thin veil of the future?  It’s impossible to say, of course, but there are technologies in existence today that inch closer and closer to the mass market with each passing minute.  Here are a few examples of the futurey awesomeness that might await:

If you survive until 2011, you might see…

 #1:  The Kinect 

Alright, so this is sort of the low hanging fruit of futurism.  After all, the Kinect is already being manufactured en masse with an eye toward a consumer launch in early October.  You might not have to make it until 2011 to see them, but considering the tortuous lack of availability that seems to accompany major revolutions in home video game technology, most of us will be waiting a few extra months.

So what is the Kinect?  This is the X-Box component that will allow players to stand in front of their televisions while a camera captures their movements and uses them to direct the character within the game.  In other words, if you’re playing a fighting game, you will actually have to punch and kick to defeat your opponent.

How the heck do you suppose they keep
that white room so spotless?

We’ve been moving in this direction for quite some time, but this might offer the first real opportunity to play a hands free video game.  It will also allow guys all over America to finally answer that nagging question about how they would fair if suddenly attacked by a random group of ninjas.

If you can survive until 2012, you might see…

 #2:  The Application Phase of the Human Genome Project 

The Human Genome Project is likely the single most mind-boggling undertaking in the history of human thought.  Identifying the 20,000-25,000 genes in human DNA and determining the sequence of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make it up was only the beginning.

Many have been led to believe that this event was oversold since the actual mapping of the genome was completed almost ten years ago.  Those who expected immediate breakthroughs were disappointed to learn that going through the data might take as long as gathering it.

This actually has nothing to do with the Human Genome Project,
but it looked sufficiently complicated to make the point.

But now even that phase in nearing completion and already practical applications for the information unearthed are being tested.  While nobody can say for certain what specific benefits will arise from these continued research, scientists speculate that we will discover new and more effective ways of diagnosing, treating and outright preventing thousands of the diseases and genetic disorders that afflict us, but that is only the beginning.  In addition to health-care, this research will almost certainly lead to revolutions in agriculture, energy production, anthropology and forensics.  No word yet on whether or not it will help us understand German humor.

If you can survive until 2015, you might see…

 #3:  Genuine Jetpacks 

Yes, I’m talking about the ones they promised us back in the eighties.  And we’re also not talking about those underwhelming stunt packs that can carry you some eighty feet in the air and stay afloat for twenty five seconds either.  We’re talking about functional, commercially available jetpacks.

I know this is a tough one to believe because it has been a favorite of futurists for so long.  I would not have included it all except for the fact that they already exist.  The Martin Aircraft company has a working model (not a prototype) that will take you 8000 feet in the air and hold enough fuel to fly for thirty minutes at upwards of sixty miles per hour.  They run on regular unleaded and they are available to buy right now for the surprisingly reasonable price of $86,000.

Buy one quick before the FAA
starts regulating them!!

So why do you have to wait until 2015?  Well, you actually don’t.  Not only could you go out and buy one of these bad boys right now and you don’t even need a pilots license to fly it.  Of course, most of us are not going to spend eighty-six grand on a jetpack, but it seems a safe bet that sometime very soon you will start seeing recreational jet-pack parks popping up.  It might cost you a few hundred bucks or even a few thousand, but in the next five years you could be renting a jetpack on vacation instead of a jetski.

If you can survive until 2020, you might see…

 #4:  Quantum Computers 

Again, this is a technology that already exists on the small scale.  While it is not commercially feasible just yet, the concept has been proven to work and functional prototypes already exist.  I cannot begin to understand how and why such surreal concepts can work in the real world, so short of copying and pasting a technical explanation, I can’t offer you much insight on how this revolution is taking place.

But I can give you an idea what the consequences will be.  Traditional computers are getting about as small as they can get.  The microchip can’t get much more micro without being too small to get single electrons through its wiring without hopping over and shorting the whole thing out.  Quantum computers promise to solve this problem by using ‘quibits’, which, by my reading seem to be magical particles that consist of fairy dust and unicorn tears.

They look like this, I think.

The point is speed.  These suckers are so fast that they will be measured in something called (I swear I didn’t make this up) ‘teraflops’ (as opposed to the mere ‘gigaflops’ that you’re computer is measured in now).  We’re talking about the ability to increase the processing speed by four or five orders of magnitude.  One summary suggested that the data that could be calculated by a quantum computer in a few minutes would take a digital computer as much time as it took the universe to get from the big bang to the Sham-Wow.

...at least I didn't make another Snuggie joke.

If you can survive until 2025, you might see…

 #5: Domestic Robots 

Again, we’re talking about a technology that already exists on some levels.  It is estimated that by the end of 2009 there were nearly 4 million domestic robots already in use.  Of course, these numbers are for things like the Roomba.  I’m talking about things like Rosie from the Jetsons.

So what can we realistically expect robots to do for us in 2025?  They can already sweep and vacuum and robots that gather and load laundry are already in limited use (nothing to get too excited about, they don’t work very well).  But given the advancements in robotic locomotion demonstrated by Honda’s Asimo and DARPA’s Big Dog, it’s pretty easy to imagine a robot that can move through your home with the same ease that you do (when you’re on the wagon, that is).

The locomotion was the big issue.  Voice recognition technology is advancing in leaps and bounds, facial recognition software is nearly perfected and computers already have plenty of processing power to store all the functions you would want from your maid-bot from loading your dishwasher to cleaning your windows to changing your baby’s diaper… or your diaper depending on your age.

This robot is free to change my diaper any time.

If you can survive until 2030, you might see…

 #6: Capes come back into style 

Clearly, this one has nothing to do with technology.  But who doesn’t want to wear a cape?  Why else would we have Halloween?  At some point in the future somebody cool enough to be the trendsetter is going to go cape and the world will never go back.

Capes have been a part of the human wardrobe on and off for at least eight centuries and are long overdue for a comeback.  We should try to keep perspective on this.  It has only been over the last sixty or seventy years that capes have become the sole domain of superheroes, nerds and other people who wear their underwear on the outside of their pants.  Until then they were symbolic of royalty, high birth or being a vampire.

But somebody has to be the brave pioneer and it can’t be a skinny 35-year old white dude (otherwise I’d be so on this).  Someone who has already achieved some sort of style credibility will have to risk it on the cape for this dream to be realized.  I suspect this will probably take at least twenty years.

This guy certainly isn't helping.

If you survive until 2040, you might see…

#7: Lunar Tourism

The absolute pinnacle of awesome-ocity, the ability to vacation on the moon is surprisingly possible.  The technology to establish a permanent and eventually self sustaining colony on the moon already exists and while the US has largely ceded space exploration, there are plenty of Asian nations happy to pick up where we left off.

In order for a lunar colony to work, it would have to be profitable.  Solar energy production, scientific research and mining are all promising exports for the moon, but these all pale in comparison for the potential profitability of tourists on the moon.

Why would you be reading this caption?
Look back at the picture.  It's awesome!

Sure, moon people would then have to put up with folks stopping at the top of escalators to take pictures, but think of the potential.  On the moon you would experience one seventh of the earth’s gravity.  You could hop off of the equivalent of a four-story building and land comfortably on the ground.  A trampoline would bounce you sixty feet in the air and not turn you into a gruesome pancake if you missed the landing.  And that’s after the weightless ride to and from!

If you survive until 2050, you might see…

 #8: Invisible Airplanes 

Okay, okay, so you wouldn’t see the invisible airplanes, but you may well ride in one.  If you can believe this, Airbus is touting this as an honest-to-Google possibility as early as 2050.  And we’re talking about full-blown Wonder Woman style invisible jets here.

Artist's rendering.

Your first thought might be “what the hell is the point?” but consider how incredibly cool it would be to get on a regular airplane, board, take off and then, at 30,000 feet, the pilot hits a button and suddenly you’re staring out the side of the plane with an unobstructed view of the ocean (providing they’ve also found a way to make the fat, smelly, talkative guy next to you transparent as well).  If that does not impress you consider the same scene at night.

Now, like all of these things, I don’t know if I completely accept the whole invisible airplane notion.  If these predictions are anything to go on, futurists have been getting it wrong for a long time.  But there is one thing I can say for certain.  If you see the next forty years of human history you will see technology that not even the most creative of minds can yet conceive.

It is truly an incredible time to be alive.  If you look hard enough for it, each day you can find a new boundary of knowledge giving way, a new technology emerging, a convenience undreamt of a few decades before.  We have scarcely scratched the surface of the advancements that nanotechnology, microbiology, robotics, genetic research and medical science have to offer us in the coming years.

Awesome new stuff you can't afford.

And if that’s not enough to convince you, consider that all the awesome new stuff that you can’t afford will soon be awesome old stuff that you can afford.

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

If you liked this blog, please pass it along.  It will make your facebook friends think you’ve lost weight.  Trust me.

8 Reaons not to buy a Blu-Ray player

If you’ve ever asked yourself the question “Should I buy a Blu-Ray player?” the answer is no.  Now before anybody gets uproarious over this, let me add a caveat.  There are three groups of people this does not apply to:

• People who absolutely have to buy every new piece of technology the day it come out,
• People who have so much money they have trouble thinking of stuff to do with it and
• People who were gonna get the Playstation anyway.

Sure, being a millionaire will buy you a lot of Blu-Ray
players, but is it worth it if you have to wear that jacket?

Since none of these people ever bothered asking themselves if they should buy a Blu-Ray, I stand by my opening statement.  For the rest of us, this question crops up more and more as we see the commercials promising us better clarity, sound, menus and extras.  Many of us sat on the fence for a long time back when DVD players hit the market but we all eventually broke down.

Now we are faced with another question and another threat of having to repurchase our favorite movies all over again.  But is Blu-Ray the next DVD or the next Laser Disc?  Here are eight pretty solid reasons to save your money:

 #1: The Cost 

The term “a lot of money” is pretty relative so I can’t say whether a Blu-Ray will dent your budget.  One thing I can say is that it will cost you a hell of a lot more than a DVD player.  Even a used (read obsolete) Blu-Ray player will cost you about a hundred bucks and you aren’t likely to find a quality new one for under two hundred.

Of course, there are dumber
ways to spend your money...

But that’s just the one time cost of the player.  It doesn’t do you much good until you start buying a few discs.  Again, expensive is relative, but they will set you back about twice or three times as much as the same movie on DVD.  In fact, for the price of the new Hollywood blockbuster on the day of its Blu-Ray release, you could buy a DVD player.

So the movies are two to three times as expensive, the player is two to four times as expensive… but state of the art technology cost money, right?

 #2: The Picture Quality 

There is no denying that the quality of a Blu-Ray disc is noticeably superior to a DVD.  The difference in clarity is striking.  Whether this is worth a 250% mark up is a matter of personal taste, but it is better.

The problem is that you might never notice.  Unless you have a pretty state of the art TV you can’t see it at all and the difference is actually pretty minor on all but the highest quality televisions.  I’m guessing that if you have the super-high-def 198-inch backlit Vizio you’re not taking my advice on whether to plunk down a few Benjamins on a Blu-Ray.  For most of us, though, the difference in quality between the two mediums will simply serve as a reminder that our TVs kind of suck.

"I hooked up the Blu-Ray, but the damn thing is still in Black & White!"

 #3: The Sound Quality 

Blu-Ray is pretty much a two-trick pony.  Better Picture, better sound.  With the exception of a few online features that only the geekiest amongst us will ever get any real use out of, this is all Blu-Ray has to offer.  So exactly how much better is the sound?

Unlike the picture quality, the improvement in sound quality is scarcely audible on even the nicest televisions.  Even the manufacturers admit that it is negligible if you don’t have 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound.  And honestly, when’s the last time you said “damn only-slightly-awesome DVD sound”?

"I SAID HOW DOES IT SOUND!?"

 #4: Load Times 

Did you know that Blu-Ray players have to load the movie up?  The movie needs to be held in the player’s hard drive in order to offer the underwhelming feature that allows you to access menu options while the movie is playing.  Of course, you will never ever use this feature.  Instead you will have to remember to pause the movie before opening up certain menu options unless you’re one of those people that just can’t watch Jackie Chan fight unless the upper-left quadrant of the screen is bathed in a translucent language menu.

But you will notice the load times.  They vary by player and by the particular movie but the best numbers I could find suggest that the average is about 88 seconds.  I must always watch long movies on bad players because in all of my experiences the actual load time is much closer to two minutes.

Two minutes might seem like a small thing to complain about, but wasn’t this supposed to be a step forward in technology?  In many ways it feels like the “dial up” of cinematic medium.

A mark of cutting edge technology...

 #5: Portability 

Everyone has a DVD player.  Not only that, but virtually every computer made in the last eight years plays DVDs and every car I’m stuck behind in traffic has a DVD player hanging from the ceiling at such an angle that I can tell what they’re watching but can’t enjoy it.  You can take your favorite DVD virtually anywhere you want.

Obviously the same cannot be said for Blu-Ray.  Those things are shackled to your living room so don’t even think about watching that new movie in your bedroom.  You want to unplug all that junk and carry the player upstairs?  If you have the surround sound and wireless plugged up it might be easier to carry your bed to the den.

Alexander the great would use a sword here...

 #6: Online Features 

I know, I know, this is supposed to be one of the good things about Blu-Ray.  The ability to access online features allows every Blu-Ray you buy to have, theoretically, unlimited bonus material.  But since your computer already gets online, there isn’t much to this.  You’ll play with it once in a while, sure, because you went to all the trouble of setting up the online capacity and you have to convince yourself that it was worth the headache.

Alright so it’s a pretty useless feature.  So what?  I mean, when I first saw that I could zoom in with my DVD player I did back flips over it, but I’ve used it precisely zero times since.  But that’s just a useless frill and that by itself is not reason enough not to buy one.

Some of us will get plenty of use
out of those online features, of course.

There is, however, a disturbing trend in Blu-Ray where more and more of the features are online and fewer and fewer of them are actually contained on the disc.  This means that you are simply banking on the continued service to get these features.  Even if Blu-Ray does take over the way DVD did, eventually it will be replaced which means eventually you will not have access to all the cool, useless extras that you paid for.

 #7: The Selection 

This is probably the biggest problem with investing in Blu-Ray and even the techies, millionaires and geeks agree on this one.  There aren’t enough movies on Blu-Ray.  The local Blockbuster might have 100 or so titles on Blu-Ray compared with thousands upon thousands of DVD choices.  And, of course, you are limited to things that just came out or a handful of classics that have already been reformatted.

Why would you want Star Wars when
classics like this are already available?

“So what?” say the manufacturers and studios, “They’re still new.  Give us time.  After all, there was a time when there were only a few titles available on DVD and now look at them!”

But this might not be true of Blu-Ray.  DVD was by most measures the fastest growing consumer technology of all time.  The pace of growth in the Blu-Ray market is laughable compared with the speed with which we converted to DVD.

There’s a reason for that, of course.  DVD offered a qualitative difference.  There was no more rewinding, no more fast forwarding to find the scene where Jackie Chan jumps off the building hand-cuffed and spins down in the bucket, you could actually see a still frame when you paused, you had bonus features, longer movies could fit on single discs, they were smaller, lighter, easier to transport and they had better picture and sound.  The advantages of Blu-Ray pale in comparison.

But even if there were substantial differences, the Blu-Ray player is a transitional technology.  All technologies are transitional, of course, but the Blu-Ray will be replaced much sooner when all movies go to…

 #8: Digital Downloads 

Even the pessimists admit that in another seven to ten years the technology will exist to stream and store movies in 1080i.  You can already hold three or four of them on your iPod nano so it won’t be long before you have something iPodish connected to the back of your TV that holds thousands of movies.  More likely you will subscribe to a service that allows you to watch movies from their massive library for a few bucks a month.

Of course, new technology has to be perfected to make this functional.  The most optimistic estimates say we are four or five years away from practical commercial application here.  So do you really want to spend upwards of a thousand dollars on a Blu-Ray and a modest collection of movies so you can have moderately better picture quality for the next half of a decade or so?

Aaron Davies

www.blognoscor.blogspot.com

Do you disagree?  Do you just want to tell me how awesome I am?  Please leave a comment below.