I was just reading a good post by John Martellaro about the iPad mini with Retina display kerfuffle. If you haven't read the news yet, its color gamut is narrower than that of the iPad Air, Google Nexus 7, and the latest offering from Amazon.

Basically what Martellaro says is that consumers generally care about a few key features, and the breadth of color gamut isn't one of them.

Actually, this notion of "spec peeping" comes up all the time in photography. We read a lab report that states that a new lens is 10 percent sharper than the one we own, and suddenly we start questioning our previous investment.

What I gently remind people of during our workshops is: "let your eyes be the judge of that." In other words, if you can't see a difference, who cares what a lab report says?

Don't get me wrong: I love detailed reviews. And I think they make a good starting point for purchase decisions. But for the final decision, I look at all of the features.

With the iPad mini, I arranged four devices on my worktable and displayed the same colorful picture on each of them. I then took a picture of them and posted it on The Digital Story with the latest podcast.

If you look at that picture and decide that you should pass on the iPad mini with Retina display, then I consider that a far more reasonable judgement than solely going off a lab report. You can do the same thing at the store with a variety of devices in front of you.

We're photographers. We should trust our eyes.

-Derrick