When Ken introduced color information in Profiler, there was a lot of discussion if it  should be defaulted to "Color" or not. Someone even claimed that 99% of all titles were color, so not setting a default would cause a lot of totally unnecessary profile updates.

Well, now that we have had a lot of updates, these are the statistics for my collection:
Color - 2494
Black & white - 657
Colorized - 3
Mixed - 31

This means that of those titles that have had this property set by now, more than 20% are not "Color". I don't know how representative my collection is, but I think in retrospect it's fairly safe to say that Ken made the right decision.

Introducing incorrect data into a database for the sake of convenience is almost never a good idea.

Actually, the absence of data in this case means "undetermined", which is not bad data.

And you're right in that a smart algorithm could have reduced the amount of errors, but it would still have introduced some bad data.

And if you look at the total amount of titles, then the percentage of color is almost certainly higher than in my collection. But that's quite irrelevant. It's the amount in the users' collections that is relevant. And it would be the users with the largest collections that would have suffered the most. And I'm not convinced that the percentage there is closer to 99% than to 78%. But I guess I could be wrong...

I have 308 profiles set to B&W out of 3416 but not all have been updated yet. But that would probably put it somewhere between 10 and 15 % when I'm done.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
Actually, the absence of data in this case means "undetermined", which is not bad data.

You can call it "undetermined", I still call it wrong.   When I filter my collection for color hundreds of profiles that are in fact color don't show up as color when I filter for them, I consider that bad data.  not a big deal as I'm slowly fixing it.  At least he made them automatically approved if you are just contributing the color field.

Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
And you're right in that a smart algorithm could have reduced the amount of errors, but it would still have introduced some bad data.

I have no real issue with what Ken decided, but they could have gone anything before 1950 gets B&W, anything above 1965 gets color, or something similar.


Quoting GSyren:

Quote:
And if you look at the total amount of titles, then the percentage of color is almost certainly higher than in my collection. But that's quite irrelevant. It's the amount in the users' collections that is relevant. And it would be the users with the largest collections that would have suffered the most. And I'm not convinced that the percentage there is closer to 99% than to 78%. But I guess I could be wrong...

Go to Best buy, walmart, anywhere they sell DVDs and blu-rays.  What percentage of those discs are in color?  I'd say it is much closer to 99% than 78%.  I would agree that DVD Profiler users probably tend to collect older B&W movies than Joe Six-pack but I still think that the vast majority of collected profiles are indeed in color.  Almost every current movie gets a DVD/Blu-ray release now and 99.9% of those are in color and has been the case since DVDs became mainstream.  Older catalog titles
make a very small dent in the overall numbers

I'd love to see if Ken could query the database and see what the number currently is.  I have a feeling that it would skew more to B&W than is actually in the database as people would tend to easily mark their B&W films as such as there are fewer to do.

Quoting scotthm:

Quote:
I'm another one who's glad we didn't default to Color...

Color - 1174 (48.1%)
Black & white - 1262 (51.7%)
Colorized - 1 (0.04%)
Mixed - 2 (0.08%)

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Wow, I guess so!

I'm the 90% that have 99.9% in color 

Color - 1744
Black & white - 5
Colorized - 0
Mixed - 0

Color - 1343
B&W - 144
Mixed - 39
Colorized - 11

Color - 1492
Black & white - 111
Colorized - 1
Mixed - 11