RSS
 

Posts Tagged ‘Mavica’

Video: a Retro Review of Sony’s 24-year-old Mavica FD5 camera, which used floppy discs for storage

04 Oct

Gordon Laing has shared another episode of Retro Reviews, this time reviewing the 24-year-old Sony Mavica FD5, one of Sony’s earliest digital cameras that recorded cameras directly to 3.5” floppy discs.

The Mavica FD5 was released in 1997 and retailed for around $ 600. While not the first Mavica camera, it was the first digital Mavica camera. As Gordon explains in the 13-minute video, the selling point of the FD5 was its use of the ubiquitous 3.5” floppy disc as a storage medium. Whereas most other digital cameras in the mid-to-late 1990s either used built-in storage or more expensive (and sometimes proprietary) storage solutions, Sony opted to go for a solution that didn’t require most consumers to go out and purchase additional hardware.

Naturally, this solution made for a rather large, square-shaped camera. But, aside from its brick-like ergonomics [insert Sony ergonomics joke here], Gordon suggests the camera is fairly intuitive and straightforward due to its almost entirely auto nature (the only adjustable setting was exposure compensation +/- 1.5EV in .5EV increments). However, there are a few user experience quirks, such as the camera displaying only the numbers of images captured, not how many remain until your 1.4MB of storage is used up.

Below is a collection of sample photographs captured by Gordon with the Mavica FD5, used with his permission:

$ (document).ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({“containerId”:”embeddedSampleGallery_5307541400″,”galleryId”:”5307541400″,”isEmbeddedWidget”:true,”selectedImageIndex”:0,”isMobile”:false}) });

At the heart of the FD5 was a CCD sensor that was carried over from Sony’s line of digital video cameras and offered a whopping .3MP (640 x 480 pixels) of resolution. Gordon notes the camera applies rather aggressive JPEG compression to the images in order to fit 20–40 60KB photographs onto a single 3.5” 1.4MP floppy disc. The fixed focal length lens on the FD5 is a 47mm equivalent with a slider on the front of the camera for activating a macro lens that popped in front of the main lens.

The FD5 uses Sony’s FP-530 batteries, which were rated for up to 500 shots per charge. However, reviewing images and keeping the rear LCD display on for extended periods of time dramatically cuts into that shot count.

As always, Gordon’s video coincides with a written Retro Review of the camera, which you can read over on CameraLabs. You can find more of his Retro Reviews on Gordon’s DinoBytes YouTube channel and find his other photography work on his camera review website, CameraLabs.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
Comments Off on Video: a Retro Review of Sony’s 24-year-old Mavica FD5 camera, which used floppy discs for storage

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Sony’s Mavica FD71 likes floppy disks, hates magnets

29 Jun

In the earliest days of consumer digital photography, back when the ‘smart’ in ‘smart phone’ was the same as the ‘smart’ in ‘a smart pair of pants’, almost every aspect of capturing, transferring, storing, sharing and printing digital images was so fraught with technical challenges and costly disappointments that it still amazes me that it ever took off at all. The secret to the eventual, inevitable, triumph over film were those most compelling of all disruptive drivers of change: convenience and immediacy.

No matter that back in the late 1990’s the pioneering digital photographer had to lay out thousands of dollars on a camera, a computer, a (color) monitor and the seemingly endless cables, cards and connectors needed to make it all work (and, it must be said, the time, expertise and patience required to tame all that technology).

We didn’t care that you could go get yourself a coffee between shots thanks to the painfully slow write speeds, or that we’d be lucky to get 20 minutes of shooting from a set of batteries or that transferring the images via serial cable took longer than the average Super Bowl, or that for the most part the end results looked like a VHS tape on pause and had the resolution of a watercolor painting.

The FD71 had an amazing (for the time) 1cm macro mode. Here, in all it’s VGA glory is the best you could hope to capture with 300,000 pixels and a decent subject.

We early adopters didn’t care about any of that, because the magic of taking a picture and seeing it appear (almost) immediately on the rear screen, and the freedom to shoot to our heart’s content without having to pay for film or processing (and without the need to scan images) was the most exciting thing to happen to photography since the Box Brownie.

And given that most early adopters of digital cameras were also early adopters of the home computer, our pain tolerance was higher to begin with. After all, we were used to spending hours fixing SCSI conflicts and trying to get onto bulletin boards using our screeching, temperamental modems.

For me, as a Mac user in the 1990’s, the biggest pain point by far was the supposedly simple process of getting the images off the camera and onto my hard drive, thanks to the lack of removal media (and the lack of card readers where there was removable media) and the horribly slow and Mac-unfriendly serial transfer process most cameras used for transfer.

And then, in late 1997, along comes Sony with the first Mavica digital stills cameras, the FD5 and FD7 (which added a rare 10x zoom), offering sophisticated feature sets and – critically – storage on the ubiquitous and universally available 3.5” floppy disk.

It may seem painfully archaic today, but back in 1996 when I first started seriously reviewing digital cameras I used to dream of a camera that shot directly onto floppies, which could be picked up for under a dollar each at any office supplier, and – critically – could be read without any additional equipment by almost every home and office PC on the planet.

The first DSC Mavicas sold incredibly well for this reason alone (and they continued to be used by schools and government agencies for years after they were discontinued). It didn’t matter that the results from the 320 x 240-pixel interlaced CCD looked like video stills or that the fixed-power flash was only usable if your subject was half a mile away (otherwise everything got washed out) or that it was agonizingly slow – it was immeasurably more convenient and made sharing (in a pre-internet era) as easy as handing over a floppy disk.

Above: it may seem run of the mill now, but in-camera effects like this were quite the novelty back in 1998.

Showing the wisdom of never buying version one of anything, it was only six months or so after the FD5 and FD7 were released that Sony launched replacements, in the shape of the FD51 and (yes, I finally got round to the subject of this week’s TBT) the 10x zoom FD71.

The FD71 brought a wealth of enhancements and fixes over its predecessor, including a faster floppy drive, faster processing, a new ‘true VGA’ progressive scan 640 x 480-pixel sensor, an improved LCD, a disk copy mode (making sharing even easier) and a new slimmer design. Even by 1998 standards though, it was still a monster, weighing in at around 1.3 lbs (590g) and roughly sharing the size and ergonomics of a full size hard disk drive.

Multi mode – 9 QVGA frames in 2.5 seconds. Great for catching the action (or in this case, inaction). A zoom lens and a sepia mode and I was an accomplished portraitist…

The FD71’s innovative feature set didn’t just solve the annoyance of slow serial transfer, it also sported a huge (for the time) 2.5” LCD screen (you could disable the back light and use reflectance to illuminate the image, meaning it could be – more or less – used in bright sunlight) and an InfoLithium battery that was capable of keeping the camera – and the power-hungry floppy drive inside – going for up to 2.5 hours or 2000 shots. (Sony even offered three different ‘strengths’ of battery.)

The FD71 also boasted a 10x zoom (this was at a time when a 3x zoom was still a big selling point), fast autofocus, a vari-power flash, full photographic controls and a selection of in-camera special effects including a ‘multi’ mode that captured 9 small images in about 2.5 seconds and combined them into a single collage. It’s hard to imagine today, but almost all of these features were unheard of on consumer level digital cameras.

At the wide end the image quality was pretty much what you’d expect for a VGA (0.3MP) camera in 1998… … but how about that zoom! 10x was pretty rare when the FD71 was launched.

All of this, including the fact that – despite having to save its images to a floppy disk – the FD71 was actually faster and more responsive than many of its competitors, made the FD71 a lot of fun to use, and despite the low resolution (most competitors were moving to 1 or 1.3 megapixels) it was a huge hit and a firm favorite in my office at the time.

Writing about the FD71 I said “I may not have much use for the small images, and I sure can’t fit it in my pocket, but… the FD71 is the most enjoyable digital camera I have ever used, and proves Sony can still teach the traditional camera manufacturers.”

A few more pictures for your, ahem, pleasure…

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
Comments Off on Sony’s Mavica FD71 likes floppy disks, hates magnets

Posted in Uncategorized

 

Throwback Thursday: a fresh look at the Sony Mavica FD-91

04 Aug

The year was 1999. Y2K loomed large, people actually used America Online via 56K modems, and I had just been taken out of school early by my parents to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace at the Cinerama. As a fifth-grader, I remember thinking it was mostly alright.

People in 1999 probably thought the Sony Mavica FD-91 was mostly alright, too. Phil Askey certainly thought so. It has an optically stabilized zoom lens with plenty of reach, abundant external controls, a viewfinder, and… XGA resolution. As such, the image quality was pretty poor, even by contemporary standards. Now that’s saying something.

So, with the benefit of seventeen years of hindsight and experience (yes, I know now that the Phantom Menace was pretty terrible), what stands out about this quirky camera today?

High on the list of things I will never be nostalgic about – garish stickers adorning my high-end electronics. The 20-cent stamp on the ‘e-mail’ portion is a nice touch, though.

One thing’s for sure: there’s only so much detail you can get when you’re talking XGA resolution. My favorite part of having this camera in the office so far (apart from the amazing Gameboy-esque beeps it makes – listen to them in the video at the end of the page) was Sam opening up some images in Adobe Bridge, going full-screen to see the image at 100% – and it actually shrank compared to the filmstrip view.

But that resolution did allow you to use floppy disks as storage, and depending on your settings, you can fit anywhere from 6-13 images on one. If you work in corporate America, I can all but guarantee you that there’s boxes of unused floppies sitting at the back of some copy room drawers. And guess what? You can still read them.

1.44MB, in all its floppy glory. The sound of the camera spinning these up and writing images to them – now that’s something I can get nostalgic about.

So the image quality generally stinks, and when light levels approach dusk, you may as well be shooting with the lens cap on. But despite that and the wonky (but comfy-to-hold) form factor, the FD-91 is remarkably well-specced.

You get a 14x optically stabilized zoom (the big block at the front of the camera is the stabilizer unit), auto and manual focus, white balance control, full manual controls (the slowest shutter speed is 1/60 sec), a selfie-friendly flip screen and a built-in flash. It even records movies to floppy disk at a maximum resolution of 320×240 pixels. Amusingly, the clips max out at five seconds long. And we thought the original three minute limit on 4K for the D5 was questionable. 

How did Sony know to make a top-hinged selfie screen way back in 1999? With foresight like that, we should all have been using Betamax.

In the end, the Mavica FD-91 is a fun toy, or a great conversation piece. Or you can use it to teach your kids about the upsides and downfalls of technologically ancient storage solutions (what, am I the only one who thinks about that sort of thing?). The batteries are still easy to find, even. But as a fun, classic digital camera to actually use for photography – there are better options out there.

Did you ever have a camera that used floppy disks? How about the follow-up models that used CDs or DVDs? Let us know in the comments!

$ (document).ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({“containerId”:”embeddedSampleGallery_6427989411″,”galleryId”:”6427989411″,”isEmbeddedWidget”:true,”standalone”:false,”selectedImageIndex”:0,”startInCommentsView”:false,”isMobile”:false}) });

Hear the sounds of the past

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
Comments Off on Throwback Thursday: a fresh look at the Sony Mavica FD-91

Posted in Uncategorized