However uncomfortable this statement might make you, it is nevertheless
true: High-quality plastics are structurally superior to metal for many
products.
Plastic can't be dented or bent. It either dampens the shock (which metal
doesn't do), or breaks altogether. So a dropped plastic product is less
likely to be damaged (either internally or externally) than a metal one.
Plastic can be molded to almost any shape, and requires little or no
post-molding handwork. This means significantly fewer plastic than metal
parts are needed to build a camera or CD player, and much less labor is
needed to assemble them, because parts can be designed to snap together.
Unfortunately, these very advantages make plastic products more-difficult to
disassemble for servicing. And because plastic reduces the cost of a
product's structural elements, it encourages the designers to reduce the
cost of other components, sometimes to the point where they are no longer
reliable or of high quality.
So the next time you pull out your Infinity Stylus Zoom Wide 80 DLX to pop
off a few shots, remember that the very things that make such a
sophisticated camera so tiny and light are precisely those things that
render it essentially non-repairable -- and therefore disposable.
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