Some of those are actually really nice, like the closeup of water droplets on the car bonnet. I would have loved one of these back in the day. The camera I mean not the car bonnet.
So what exactly happened with the picture of the Windows 95 rig? Was that just a case of the flash being on causing everything to get washed out or was there just an issue with the lighting of the room combined with the colors of the system or possibly the settings that caused it to turn out like that? Also on the subject of the pictures, when I first saw the mural with the rooster in the video I almost thought it was the negative filter from the FD87 for a second, that threw me off. lol
I imagine a lot of photographers would have eventually welcomed a system like that. As resolution went up the number of shots you could store on each disk dropped dramatically, and the last floppy mavica Sony made (the FD200) had a 2MP sensor and could store all of *four* pictures on a disk. A photo session would have required a *lot* of swapping (which is why they also came with a memory stick slot built-in, prompting the question of whether they even bothered with the floppy drive at all by that point).
I bought an FD-7 in the ship's store on board the USS George Washington in 2000. I used it to take photos on deployment and email them home the same day. It was revolutionary at the time and my wife certainly appreciated it.
This is kind of random but my brother worked as the cashier on the George Washington back in 2004. To see somebody else talking about that store is weird lol.
Yeah, it's not necessary for now, but eventually some generation will update it. It wasn't until the past decade that we finally stopped using a spinning hourglass as a loading icon in our OS's. :)
I had an FD75. Just using it in public at the time attracted so much attention! I took a few pictures of a tourist couple and gave them the disk. Then a flashbulb went off. Take the Mavica and a pocket full of reformatted AOL disks down to any tourist destination and offer 5 shots on a floppy for five bucks when people asked about it. Profit!
Living in Buenos Aires in 2002, it was kind of difficult to get your hands on a digital camera. So I was thrilled when I found out my girlfriend at the time had a Mavica. I wanted to do a stencil of the opening frame of "Dr. Katz, professional therapist", so I asked her to take a photo of paused VCR and email it to me. I couldn't believe it. A week later I made a stencil from that picture, and proudly wore that shirt until it didn't fit anymore. :)
My Poppop had the 75, and he always used it to take pictures at family events. We recently moved him into an assisted living facility with my Grandma and started cleaning out their house, which we discovered was filled with thousands of floppy disks, all with pictures on them. I bought a USB floppy drive to go through them and have been having a blast seeing what my Poppop thought was important enough to take pictures of (which was pretty much everything.) Thank you for making this, it was nice to be reminded of simpler times and an amazing man :3
People hear “20 images per disc” and they think, “how ridiculously small!” But they forget that your average film cartridge only held about that many pictures... So people were used to having to swap out a new film cartridge (or a new floppy disc) after 20 pictures or so. You compare it to a modern camera that can store, literally, thousands of pictures and of course it’s ridiculous. But for the day, 20 pictures on a single disc was not bad at all. I really liked how “1990s” the pictures from the FD5 looked. They literally look like something you’d see from a TV show back then. It was very nostalgic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that while solid state Compact Flash was already around, it was still pricey. I recall a 2 megabyte Sandisk for like $40 in 1998 or something and they went up steeply in price in larger configurations from there. You had to unload the images to a computer/laptop to freeup space for more photos, while on the mavica you just bought a box full of floppies for at that time was already really cheap.
Yeah, I think possibly because I was already (at least nominally) an adult by then I was quite impressed: 20 images is about what I could get on a roll of crappy compact camera film, and then of course you had to get the photos printed, which could be costly if you were into taking a lot of pictures (so I wasn't, by default). If I'd had this I'd have gone wild because from the late 80s onwards I *always* had floppy disks, of varying sizes and capacities, with me. It wouldn't have bothered me not all all to be trogging around with a box of 10 3.5 inch floppies in my backpack: 200 photos right there.
35mm film is 12,24 or 36 exposures (depending on length of roll). 120 film (medium format) is 8,12 and 16 exposures (depending on negative size/aspect ratio). This puts the FD series of Sony Mavicas right inside of "ordinary" film camera shot capacity, and better than the 10 (IIRC) of a Polaroid (pack version).
TheExileFox Polaroids are awesome, I had the older.black and with roll film ones (that you peeled apart to get the print) and the later film pack types. I still have a mint condition SX-70 in my collection! I just meant Mavicas had "better" (higher number) of exposures before reloading.
The people I worked for in 1998 were spending $700 a month on Polaroid film, so the $600 tag on the Mavica was a bargain and inspired them to digitize their whole reporting system... The downside was that you had a lot of folks with various levels of competence handling a mechanical storage system...
These things were everywhere. I worked for an education agency that put together a grant to get these in the hands of about 40 teachers in our area. I still have archived pics and vids taken in 1997-98. I remember toting several boxes of floppies around in order to swap them out as quickly as possible when doing sporting events, etc.
I used one of those when working in my university campus tech center, when we need to take photos in a pinch. There was along with it lot of other then-current tech that is outdated now, like Jaz drives, firewire external HDDs etc. I bought a 120GB external one for my video class, still have it somewhere since nobody is gonna buy it lol
It's funny - for me, I had never even seen these things until watching this video. I was even in art college taking photography courses around the time these came out, but we were still learning on film. I think in some areas, people weren't aware of digital still cameras yet.
Oh boy, I turned one of these up in a bin of old tech shit at work, and we had a field day taking pictures on floppy diskettes and printing them out. Good times!
I did IT work for a remodeling firm from 97-2002 and somewhere in the 97/98 era we got one of these. The project mangers basically fought over who got to use it, it was such a valuable tool. I was quickly used by management to consult for other companies like realtors, care sales men, the practical use of these cameras was incredible, but like you said, quickly eclipsed by flash memory enabled cameras, and higher resolution models.
I remember playing with a Mavica that my grandpa gave to us back in the early 2000s. And a department at my work still uses one for taking photos for their projects!
I used to work for Best Buy back in the mid/late 90s, and the Mavica was my go to choice for most consumers. Just loved that silver brick. Took decent photos and it was crazy easy to use. One night a guy came in looking to buy gifts for his employees around the holidays. I talked him into buying 15 FD7s! It was the single largest sale our store had that year. Good times. I can only imagine where all those cameras ended up.
Yes, we had one of these at my school in the 90s! The floppy drive was super nifty compared to other junky cameras of that era that were super limited by their storage. I used this camera to make a virtual photo tour of my high school and post it to the internet - a real novel idea at the time :).
They are indeed! And while he did cover similar cameras it's worth noting he didn't cover _any_ of the camera models that I did in this video, just certain other Mavica cameras. Tried to make this unique :)
Even with the different models there were still different focuses like the history and the comparison to similar products as opposed to the performance of the cameras themselves. Definitely interesting to see the different perspectives and presentations of the same product and topic.
After watching the 8 bit guys video I ended up buying the exact same one as he did for 5 euros. These cameras are currently at bargain prices! Reminds me of the Russian zenith cameras I collected five years ago. Now everybody discovered them...
Same here! I am actually waiting for my Mavica FD7 to arrive in the next couple of days from ebay :) I would deffo agree with Clint on choosing the "oldest" variant, as it has this "vintage" or antique feeling. Also the experience of using them is actually very different. Just limitations put by size of floppy (as opposed to larger memory cards) force user to have completely different experience (eg. you think before take a picture)...
Dang, I was hoping for "American retro computing youtuber challenge - Civil War! - North Carolina v. Texas! In 3D! On ice! MT-32 soundtrack available!"
Used these in 5th grade at my Elementary School. They were great except for when teacher would leave the floppy disks in the computer and the computer would not boot. I got called out of my class a few times from previous teachers to help them with their computer problems, because of this. Yea my teachers from previous years would call me out of class instead of calling Help Desk.
Or simply eject the disk themselves......... 'Oh shit, the computer isn't booting, maybe I should call someone..... Oh, wait, there's a non-bootable disk in the floppy drive, I'll just take that out of there and it'll boot, nvm.' Also, in most cases, although this pretty much only applies to personally-owned PCs of the time period, simply shifting the boot order around in the BIOS to give the hard drive or optical drive priority should eliminate that problem too.
It's so cool to see how far we've come! I'm so grateful that I've had the privilege to follow the tech through the years, from the late 80's till today. So much have happened in the last 25 years, and looking back is an adventure in and of itself.
Very cool video! My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 800 (1999). It was 2mp and used Compact Flash media. I have photos blown up to 24x36 from this camera and they look great! I never bought a Mavica back in the day, but came across one in the box for $15 at a local Pawn Shop, so I picked it up. It's the FD7 model with the 10x optical zoom. Thanks again for sharing this awesome video.
My cousins in sweden had one of these, i remember we always got a huge package full of floppy disks from them every christmas in the late 90s/early 2000s.
What a flashback to 1997! I was working at a big museum in the city when I got an email from the geek downstairs saying to come down to see the new toy the department got for him. It was a MVC-FD5 straight outta the box. I had already had my own digital camera with a whole 2 mb of internal memory and wanted to know what saving to floppy disks was like. Overall it was cool, but saving pics seemed to take forever which got annoying fast. I think I used it once or twice but liked the speed of my own digital camera even though it was smaller and cheaper. Come on now it was 21 freaking years ago! LoL
My parents had the FD75. I loved that thing as a kid. I can still remember the sounds it made as it wrote images to the disk. Great video as always, Clint.
My step dad had one of these cameras for his job as building inspector. I've seen some of his pictures when he took the camera home to either print out the pictures or clear the drives. It's amazing what some of these builders and contractors would try and slip by the inspectors. He even had to get a bed cover on his pickup because he found a cooler of full of fresh deer meat in his truck one time. He pulled it out and set it aside because he was not one of the types who would get bribed.
My fondest memory of these cameras was in high school. My school was partnered with another that had a slightly bigger budget for technology classes/hardware, so in our junior and senior years we could elect to take vo-tec classes there. They had one of the Mavicas and it totally blew our minds. I still have pics from it today! What also makes me remember it fondly was that was right about the time that Chevy released the next-gen Corvette and I was able to get pics of one at the school :D
I remember in 2001 I had a holiday to Turkey. My boss’s assistant at the time was willing to loan me her Mavica. I can’t remember which model it was but I do remember in its best image setting, it could store 15 images on a single disk in a MVC-[incremental number here from 001].jpg format. I was really shocked to find how the FDD was just fast enough to save a small movie on it. Dat FDD seek noise tho. Love those times.
The Mavica brings me back! Had both the 5 and the 87 at a job in the late 90s and early 2000s and would borrow them on weekends all the time. I'd fill up a box of disks easy on a weekend or at a party, you couldn't beat it at the time. Took so many pics with friends back then we even had our own website just to host them, being that time before social media. The Mavica was a big part of our lives back then and has a special place in my memory. At the time, it was simply the best digital camera you could have with its price, performance and storage. Only being limited to how many floppies you'd bring with you. Great piece of tech history. In my opinion was probably one of the most important digital cameras ever released. Thanks for the jog down memory lane, this is a camera that shouldn't be forgotten. Highly recommend getting your hands on the successor CD Mavica which used miniCDs, which possibly could compete some digital cameras still out there today in image quality. While not as memorable or as common as the Floppy Mavica's, the CD Mavica was certainly an interesting fork in the digital camera family tree.
+LGR I’ll make it better! Take a MicroSD to Memory Stick adapter, put a MicroSD card in there, put it in that Memory Stick to floppy adapter, then see if you can’t copy Duke Nukem 3D to it an run it. I winder just how slow the transfer rates would be? XD
@@LGR According to my research about the floppy disk adapter, it has its own file system and data is not presented in the memory sticks in a straight forward way. It requires a Windows 95/98 PC with a floppy disk slot and proprietary driver installed. My adapter works on MVC-FD88 but my PC won't read the MS card installed inside it.
Thank you for opening up waves of nostalgia for me with this video :) My father loved his FD88 when he got it & when he passed away in 2004 his widow sent it to me,it does not work & I've no use for it but just can not bring myself to throw it out...still in storage to this day
My grandmother had one when I was like 14. It was "out of date" when I started trying to get a decent camera around 02, but that Damn camera always irritated me by being so Damn good in many ways.... The images were clearer than my newer cameras with higher MP sensors, it compressed them nicely to fit a bunch on a floppy drive, and the floppy in the 4x speed models wrote an image in about 2sec - faster than processing and saving on whatever cameras I had. They really kept relevant for a while and bothered me by being "unbeatable" by my budget.
I still have a ton of pictures from the late 90s and early 2000s taken with the mavica, and many of them hold up very well. Back then if you offloaded to a PC and did some simple retouching with photoshop or paint shop pro, you'd end up with something that was fair to great depending on the lighting conditions, but rarely terrible. Those images have aged fairy well over the decades. A real testament to the quality of those cameras.
Kids these days will never know the feeling. When we had film you had to know how to take photos. You didn’t want a roll of blurred and dark photos coming back. When digital came out we all felt like the photos were unlimited and free because we could take as many as we wanted, delete or save, and do it again.
When I was a security guard in the early 2000s, our department got a Sony Mavica camera to replace the old Polaroid camera we had been using. I used to love using that camera and I still have a few pictures I snapped with it from around the office.
I so love how you are able to take photos and make them look so old because of the location. I love it. Your selfie with the flash is so reminiscent of high school. I had so many washed out pics, lol. They were even considered good back then by most people online. You always looked cute washed out.
This brings back great memories from my high school yearbook staff days! I would roam the halls with this very camera taking thousands of photos over the course of two years as yearbook editor. I was CONSTANTLY in need of 3.5" floppies during that time. It really was an incredibly convenient format.
Nice!! I was my middle school photographer and this was the same camera I used to get yearbook pics. Nothing but fond memories until I remember trying to get action shots.
The thing I love about you LGR is you get it, it's about the feel of the mechanical drive, the snap of the disk being ejected, the over-engineering of the entire device, it's a thing of beauty. I myself use my FD75 all the time, despite having access to my Nikon D7200 (which I also use a great deal) the FD75 has a special place in my heart and gives life to my old FDD's.
Started to go back to that myself, modern phone, retro emulation handheld (ambernic RG351MP), any one of several new and retro cameras, even got a modern digital music player (Fiio M9). No joke, it's actually great to not depend on a single device, with a single (non replaceable) battery, and devices built for certain tasks are deffinitly easier and more fun to use for those tasks, or just more cool, even if a backpack or messenger bag might be handy if you want it all at once
$599 USD...where have I heard that before? It's on the tip of my tongue...seems like Sony has some love for that particular price point. Known for striking weak points for massive damage to our wallets.
Clint, while many noted that other youtubers already touched this whole old cameras topic, I want you to remember that everyone has his own style of doing things, and that yours is one of the most pleasing. So thank you for everything you share with us. Can't wait for the next one! :)
I have fond memories of this camera. My Dad received one from a friend at Sony to test, and he promptly passed it on to me. At the time I was into photography in a big way, and the ability to take photos and instantly see the result blew my tiny little mind.
The FAA is very familiar with this format to deal with mechanic complaints from Airlines. Literally every single piece of a plane During certain eras that was repaired was photographed buy a camera like this from every possible angle and documented hand written on the disc and stored in case a failure. Does anyone have any experience in this?
Oh man! This is the camera my parents had. All my childhood pictures were taken on this and have a box full of floppies in the attic somewhere. Lol I hope they're still intact. So cool to see it again.
I have about 4 of these one still sealed from walmart, pretty amazing cameras in the early 2000s . I could take close ups of marks signatures etc. for Ebay, people always asked what beatiful pics. What are you using?? My father and I still use these for antiques and really no need to upgrade. Price is great specially years after the $600 whopping price dropped like a ton of bricks. Id get them for around 50 the new one I got was 200 but thats not bad sealed. Slapping floppy discs in and out and sticking them in the pc was a piece of cake back then.
Imagine living in times where phones cost 1500 €+... These are the end times. Although the technology is also like a dream, when you were raised with trash level 90s and 2000s stuff. As a child I was happy when games opened at all, to me 640 x 480 15-25 FPS was "running" - I used to play CoD4 like that too for the first year, the laptop would shut off every two hours for a forced cooldown break. Still memorable times.
I used one of these in high school for newspaper when we wanted a quick picture (usually portraits) where we didn't want to spend the film and time to develop. Pretty handy in the day!
nice I use a FD92 for Black and White photos, still think it takes the best. I actually use it at Independent Pro Wrestling events I go to in Chicago. Floppies is just too much to carry if I have to run for cover LOL i use a 128MB Stick
My father worked as an Traffic accident reconstruction investigator for the police department in my home town and there department used this series of FD cameras for there ease of use and access of files. They did issue newer models as they came out so it was really cool having the ability to use many different models of this camera and i loved them super easy to use and like many computer users of the times we had lots of Floppy Disks so we always had an abundance of media to which we could store images on until your video popped up on my feed today i had completely forgot about them very happy for the blast from the past keep up the great works...
My primary school had one of these that I remember using a lot in grade 6 (2002). From memory it could have been an FD75 - I'm desperately trying to remember the layout of the Power and Eject buttons! We didn't have a digital camera at home until 2004 so I was absolutely enamoured with the Mavica when I first used it, especially given how easy it was to access the photos. This was indeed a very enjoyable trip down memory lane.
These old tech videos fill me with the STRANGEST sense of nostalgia and dread at the same time. I was born 1990 though so it might be because I only sort of remember the time before digital media became the absolute norm. LGR is one of very few channels I acctually watch from start to finnish these days. Keep it coming
My school teacher used it in class to take photos of our class, I remember it was so fun it to use because we could see our photos right away on the computers.
I really don't know how but LGR talking about digital cameras is very soothing to me. Should watch this, have a drink, and sit back and relax one of these days.
I did a truck magazine photoshoot with the panorama kodak film camera disposable in 97 and still have the pics. They were excellent and kept me from the underwhelming digital cameras at the time. Waited till about 01 to go digital.
As much I might not know about computer related tech, is really nice to be educated on the most popular or unpopular items by someone who's definitely used to this I hope to see more grand content from you.
My father has been selling antiques on eBay since 1997 and he has a Digital Mavica that he used to take photos of merchandise all the way until 2016 when he finally switched over to using his iPhone for product photos. Hearing the beeps and mechanical floppy disk reader noises brings back so many memories.
The very first digital camera I ever used was a Mavica! A high school teacher of mine let me use it for a project I think in 2002, not sure what model it was but I was blown away that it took 3.5" diskettes. I really want a FD5 now
I Owned the FD71. I remember bringing it to the office and my colleagues took photos of everything, including a candy jar and the inside of an empty bin.
Another great video. I enjoy these videos because it takes me back to a time when I was in college and enjoying life. Floppy drives. Zip drives. Windows 95. Love that time.
I don't find it terribly shocking, the image quality was good enough for student reports and the connivance of floppies was hard to beat. Why fix what wasn't broken?
Pro-Tip: that Mavica FD87 should support disk copy which does it at a low level so far anything i have tried in it (except disks lower than 1.44MB) and non variable speed was able to copy including system disks. And it does it at 4x.
In Denmark around 2001-2007, we used a variety of digital floppy cameras. They were great, and a fun experience, and it was my first experience with a digital camera. Thanks for a great video. Total nostalgic vibes!
I know someone else already said it, but stringing together dozens of LGR's videos with the volume levels dropped world make an awesome ASMR-style fall asleep channel! I love the look back at old but important tech, but every time I hear him say 'FD-series' I keep thinking Mazdas...
Aerin Ravage I keep thinking how fucked the used enthusiast car market is. Muscle cars, euros, or JDM/imports, if it's at all desirable, prices are absolutely through the roof if it isn't a fixer uper
I admittedly will listen to old LGR videos (and other things) when trying to fall asleep. It's that sweet spot of interesting enough to hold my attention but not "energetic" enough to keep me awake. Gentle background music; a calm, friendly voice talking about casual topics and no loud, sudden noises. Makes me want to take a nap just thinking about it.
I actually bought one from a garage sale about a year ago for $2 and I didn’t even know how to use it or even put photos into my computer off the floppy disk, it just looked so old and crappy that I knew I had to have it
I own a Cybershot from 2003, they're truly amazing at what they can do and I have taken modern photos with them that rival some stuff my smartphone can do in low light.
Hmm, a camera that uses floppy disks as storage medium? Sound like a great way to lose your pictures... still a cool technology and a awesome video as always:)
More reliable than SmartMedia that came out around that time. Those cards actually short circuited if you put your fingers across the open terminals. They also bent really easy and lost all your data. Can't tell you how fondly I remember losing images - the only time I've ever lost any - with SmartMedia.
Oddly, I never suffered any data loss on a floppy disc, ever, before I got the chance to get them on "the next better thing". I did have a Lexar "USB enabled" CF card shit the bed and lost about 40 pictures though.
Diskettes weren't as reliable as flash memory these days, but cheap, handy and compatible with any PC. Furthermore, the Mavica used FAT12, JPEG and didn't require any additional software. An ingenious choice for a consumer product.
I used to work at Wal-Mart's photo department and when we took over the electronics sections camera bar, this beauty was there and I absolutely loved it. It took great pictures and they looked like they came from an expensive camera. It's what made me fall in love with Sony products. I still have this camera and use it on occasions, I still love this piece of history and of course will continue to take care of it like a fine wine.
Thanks LGR, for taking me back to middle school computer class! We used some variation of these Mavica cameras, with a Lazy Susan, to create "360" Quicktime videos of still objects circa 2001/2002
To the best of my knowledge there was no such camera. But there were two Panasonic models that used the LS-120 superdisk and one that used Iomega Clik disks - perhaps you're thinking of them?
I believe Sony developed the 2.88 for the Mavica but I can't remember if they ever released one with it. By the time the drives and media were getting affordable enough to be a force in the market, floppies were dying in droves as zip drives, USB, and multiple gigabyte hard drives were becoming a thing. That all happened right about the same time that compact flash became a player in the camera market, thus murdering just about everything else until the SD card came along.
It was because of the floppy drive Mavica that I have so many pics of my kids when they were little in the 90s- it was so easy to grab a bunch of discs and keep shooting on trips or even just candids. Before that it was a hassle to get the pics onto the pc and use them. I enjoyed it and am grateful for it.
Oh man this brings back memories of middle school. I remember when I was in shop class, we had to build a C02 powered race car and for some reason we had to take a picture of the car. We used either this camera (or a similar camera) and I just remember that it used a floppy disk and it blew my mind! Funny enough I brought this up when me and my friend were watching a earlier video of yours, so its funny that you made this video.
Hi LGR! This one hit a soft spot... Had one of these (the crappiest one) Mavicas in elementary and it was one of the weirdest pieces of tech I'd seen at the time. Great to see it wasn't just a myth! ;)
I honestly don't think anything is as convenient as these cameras. Floppy disks were all over the place, and were so cheap you could just label them add toss them in a caddy. While new cameras can store tons of images on an sd card; there's so many images and the cards are so small it isn't as nice for stashing away. Such a nice camera, and was useful way past it's date.
Uhhh... My modern camera has a 64GB card in it... I don't have need to stash it away as I literally can't take that many pictures in a day, a week, or potentially a year. Drop it in the USB 3.0 reader at the end of my adventures and a few minutes later I can make as many copies as I want and preserve them forever across dozens of other easy to use and massive storage mediums. I can even burn a Bluray disc of my most precious memories (for my entire life so far... I doubt I have more than 50gb of personal photos) and take it into work to safe guard them against fire. Floppies are one of the great many things I don't miss about the past. Right about the time a "meh" level game was coming on 6 disks and a normal hard drive was over 1GB, 1.44MB was just huge pain in the ass.
If you'd like to see more of the photos I took with the MVC-FD5, check out this album of images!
imgur.com/a/I99i7
Keep it up with these fake retro photos.
LGR just saw this come up. Got a sony mavica after seing the 8 bit guys video on it. They are great cameras and fun to use with my windows 98 HP.
nightcityryder they are huge. Supprisingly mine has great battery life and I can get at least 18 photos out of a disk
Some of those are actually really nice, like the closeup of water droplets on the car bonnet. I would have loved one of these back in the day. The camera I mean not the car bonnet.
So what exactly happened with the picture of the Windows 95 rig? Was that just a case of the flash being on causing everything to get washed out or was there just an issue with the lighting of the room combined with the colors of the system or possibly the settings that caused it to turn out like that?
Also on the subject of the pictures, when I first saw the mural with the rooster in the video I almost thought it was the negative filter from the FD87 for a second, that threw me off. lol
I'm imagining some photographer taking photos and swapping floppies like it's a bolt action
The floppy disk mechanism in the FD5 does have a bit of a weapon-like quality to it. Highly satisfying!
I imagine a lot of photographers would have eventually welcomed a system like that. As resolution went up the number of shots you could store on each disk dropped dramatically, and the last floppy mavica Sony made (the FD200) had a 2MP sensor and could store all of *four* pictures on a disk. A photo session would have required a *lot* of swapping (which is why they also came with a memory stick slot built-in, prompting the question of whether they even bothered with the floppy drive at all by that point).
The CANNON
Dropping shells everywhere.
Wouldn't that be films?
I bought an FD-7 in the ship's store on board the USS George Washington in 2000. I used it to take photos on deployment and email them home the same day. It was revolutionary at the time and my wife certainly appreciated it.
I did the same thing on the uss seattle AOE3 in 2000 filmed a lot with it in the med!!
This is kind of random but my brother worked as the cashier on the George Washington back in 2004. To see somebody else talking about that store is weird lol.
That's awesome! Also, thank you for your service!
Its going to be a sad day if they ever remove the floppy disk as the universal save icon
I don't think they will. Because even people who have never used a floppy knows that it means "save" as an icon. It's really recognizable imo.
Hmm what kind of icon will they choose? An hard disk?
I think the standard SD Card shape is just as easy to recognize by now, so that's a good candidate for a successor.
Yeah, it's not necessary for now, but eventually some generation will update it. It wasn't until the past decade that we finally stopped using a spinning hourglass as a loading icon in our OS's. :)
When the world abandons GUIs as the fad they are and reverts back to a pure text operating system the issue will become moot.
My dad used to take out the floppy and exclaim "oh no ! I exposed it to light!" Dads...
@@egenhoferj r/ihavereddit
@@maxywaxy34 My brain hurts from reading that
/watch?v=Wh4aTy0Cx_
I mean, it depends on the kind of "floppy" your dad took out
Well, that made me chuckle, so I'm just the kinda guy your dad's jokes were aimed at. Let him know his jokes do work for some. :)
I had an FD75. Just using it in public at the time attracted so much attention! I took a few pictures of a tourist couple and gave them the disk. Then a flashbulb went off. Take the Mavica and a pocket full of reformatted AOL disks down to any tourist destination and offer 5 shots on a floppy for five bucks when people asked about it. Profit!
Nice idea. Hope those floppies laat long enough for them to save.
Living in Buenos Aires in 2002, it was kind of difficult to get your hands on a digital camera. So I was thrilled when I found out my girlfriend at the time had a Mavica. I wanted to do a stencil of the opening frame of "Dr. Katz, professional therapist", so I asked her to take a photo of paused VCR and email it to me. I couldn't believe it. A week later I made a stencil from that picture, and proudly wore that shirt until it didn't fit anymore. :)
Diego V. Miranda de locomotion?
@@Joel-bh5xd ¡claro!
My Poppop had the 75, and he always used it to take pictures at family events. We recently moved him into an assisted living facility with my Grandma and started cleaning out their house, which we discovered was filled with thousands of floppy disks, all with pictures on them. I bought a USB floppy drive to go through them and have been having a blast seeing what my Poppop thought was important enough to take pictures of (which was pretty much everything.) Thank you for making this, it was nice to be reminded of simpler times and an amazing man :3
People hear “20 images per disc” and they think, “how ridiculously small!” But they forget that your average film cartridge only held about that many pictures... So people were used to having to swap out a new film cartridge (or a new floppy disc) after 20 pictures or so. You compare it to a modern camera that can store, literally, thousands of pictures and of course it’s ridiculous. But for the day, 20 pictures on a single disc was not bad at all.
I really liked how “1990s” the pictures from the FD5 looked. They literally look like something you’d see from a TV show back then. It was very nostalgic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that while solid state Compact Flash was already around, it was still pricey. I recall a 2 megabyte Sandisk for like $40 in 1998 or something and they went up steeply in price in larger configurations from there. You had to unload the images to a computer/laptop to freeup space for more photos, while on the mavica you just bought a box full of floppies for at that time was already really cheap.
Yeah, I think possibly because I was already (at least nominally) an adult by then I was quite impressed: 20 images is about what I could get on a roll of crappy compact camera film, and then of course you had to get the photos printed, which could be costly if you were into taking a lot of pictures (so I wasn't, by default). If I'd had this I'd have gone wild because from the late 80s onwards I *always* had floppy disks, of varying sizes and capacities, with me. It wouldn't have bothered me not all all to be trogging around with a box of 10 3.5 inch floppies in my backpack: 200 photos right there.
35mm film is 12,24 or 36 exposures (depending on length of roll). 120 film (medium format) is 8,12 and 16 exposures (depending on negative size/aspect ratio). This puts the FD series of Sony Mavicas right inside of "ordinary" film camera shot capacity, and better than the 10 (IIRC) of a Polaroid (pack version).
Polaroid is cool tho
TheExileFox Polaroids are awesome, I had the older.black and with roll film ones (that you peeled apart to get the print) and the later film pack types. I still have a mint condition SX-70 in my collection! I just meant Mavicas had "better" (higher number) of exposures before reloading.
I work in the Argentinian patagonia, the desert part, and I foung one MD5 in an old storage. Still works and holds up battery charge.
I used one of these in 1997 at the advertising company I was working at, and it made my life so much better. Thanks for the memories.
The people I worked for in 1998 were spending $700 a month on Polaroid film, so the $600 tag on the Mavica was a bargain and inspired them to digitize their whole reporting system...
The downside was that you had a lot of folks with various levels of competence handling a mechanical storage system...
These things were everywhere. I worked for an education agency that put together a grant to get these in the hands of about 40 teachers in our area. I still have archived pics and vids taken in 1997-98. I remember toting several boxes of floppies around in order to swap them out as quickly as possible when doing sporting events, etc.
I used one of those when working in my university campus tech center, when we need to take photos in a pinch. There was along with it lot of other then-current tech that is outdated now, like Jaz drives, firewire external HDDs etc. I bought a 120GB external one for my video class, still have it somewhere since nobody is gonna buy it lol
It's funny - for me, I had never even seen these things until watching this video. I was even in art college taking photography courses around the time these came out, but we were still learning on film. I think in some areas, people weren't aware of digital still cameras yet.
Oh boy, I turned one of these up in a bin of old tech shit at work, and we had a field day taking pictures on floppy diskettes and printing them out. Good times!
I did IT work for a remodeling firm from 97-2002 and somewhere in the 97/98 era we got one of these. The project mangers basically fought over who got to use it, it was such a valuable tool. I was quickly used by management to consult for other companies like realtors, care sales men, the practical use of these cameras was incredible, but like you said, quickly eclipsed by flash memory enabled cameras, and higher resolution models.
I remember playing with a Mavica that my grandpa gave to us back in the early 2000s. And a department at my work still uses one for taking photos for their projects!
The idea of a floppy disk grinding away with its iconic noise every time you take a picture puts a smile on my face. That's amazing.
I love it when you use posh words like "positively ubiquitous".
I used to work for Best Buy back in the mid/late 90s, and the Mavica was my go to choice for most consumers. Just loved that silver brick. Took decent photos and it was crazy easy to use.
One night a guy came in looking to buy gifts for his employees around the holidays. I talked him into buying 15 FD7s! It was the single largest sale our store had that year. Good times. I can only imagine where all those cameras ended up.
Yes, we had one of these at my school in the 90s! The floppy drive was super nifty compared to other junky cameras of that era that were super limited by their storage. I used this camera to make a virtual photo tour of my high school and post it to the internet - a real novel idea at the time :).
I remember The 8-Bit Guy also did a video on this line of cameras. They are fascinating little cameras.
They are indeed! And while he did cover similar cameras it's worth noting he didn't cover _any_ of the camera models that I did in this video, just certain other Mavica cameras. Tried to make this unique :)
Even with the different models there were still different focuses like the history and the comparison to similar products as opposed to the performance of the cameras themselves. Definitely interesting to see the different perspectives and presentations of the same product and topic.
After watching the 8 bit guys video I ended up buying the exact same one as he did for 5 euros. These cameras are currently at bargain prices! Reminds me of the Russian zenith cameras I collected five years ago. Now everybody discovered them...
Same here! I am actually waiting for my Mavica FD7 to arrive in the next couple of days from ebay :) I would deffo agree with Clint on choosing the "oldest" variant, as it has this "vintage" or antique feeling. Also the experience of using them is actually very different. Just limitations put by size of floppy (as opposed to larger memory cards) force user to have completely different experience (eg. you think before take a picture)...
Dang, I was hoping for "American retro computing youtuber challenge - Civil War! - North Carolina v. Texas! In 3D! On ice! MT-32 soundtrack available!"
I love that woodgrain on the USB floppy. Now I need to get some for my own, man.
Used these in 5th grade at my Elementary School. They were great except for when teacher would leave the floppy disks in the computer and the computer would not boot. I got called out of my class a few times from previous teachers to help them with their computer problems, because of this. Yea my teachers from previous years would call me out of class instead of calling Help Desk.
I pretty much fix the projector issues at my school when they come up
Ryan Yoder yea we still had a few Apple II in the classrooms. They were in the process of moving over to PC with Windows NT 4
Or simply eject the disk themselves.........
'Oh shit, the computer isn't booting, maybe I should call someone..... Oh, wait, there's a non-bootable disk in the floppy drive, I'll just take that out of there and it'll boot, nvm.'
Also, in most cases, although this pretty much only applies to personally-owned PCs of the time period, simply shifting the boot order around in the BIOS to give the hard drive or optical drive priority should eliminate that problem too.
It's so cool to see how far we've come! I'm so grateful that I've had the privilege to follow the tech through the years, from the late 80's till today. So much have happened in the last 25 years, and looking back is an adventure in and of itself.
Very cool video! My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 800 (1999). It was 2mp and used Compact Flash media. I have photos blown up to 24x36 from this camera and they look great! I never bought a Mavica back in the day, but came across one in the box for $15 at a local Pawn Shop, so I picked it up. It's the FD7 model with the 10x optical zoom. Thanks again for sharing this awesome video.
My cousins in sweden had one of these, i remember we always got a huge package full of floppy disks from them every christmas in the late 90s/early 2000s.
What a flashback to 1997! I was working at a big museum in the city when I got an email from the geek downstairs saying to come down to see the new toy the department got for him. It was a MVC-FD5 straight outta the box. I had already had my own digital camera with a whole 2 mb of internal memory and wanted to know what saving to floppy disks was like. Overall it was cool, but saving pics seemed to take forever which got annoying fast. I think I used it once or twice but liked the speed of my own digital camera even though it was smaller and cheaper. Come on now it was 21 freaking years ago! LoL
My parents had the FD75. I loved that thing as a kid. I can still remember the sounds it made as it wrote images to the disk.
Great video as always, Clint.
My step dad had one of these cameras for his job as building inspector. I've seen some of his pictures when he took the camera home to either print out the pictures or clear the drives. It's amazing what some of these builders and contractors would try and slip by the inspectors. He even had to get a bed cover on his pickup because he found a cooler of full of fresh deer meat in his truck one time. He pulled it out and set it aside because he was not one of the types who would get bribed.
My fondest memory of these cameras was in high school. My school was partnered with another that had a slightly bigger budget for technology classes/hardware, so in our junior and senior years we could elect to take vo-tec classes there. They had one of the Mavicas and it totally blew our minds. I still have pics from it today! What also makes me remember it fondly was that was right about the time that Chevy released the next-gen Corvette and I was able to get pics of one at the school :D
I remember in 2001 I had a holiday to Turkey. My boss’s assistant at the time was willing to loan me her Mavica. I can’t remember which model it was but I do remember in its best image setting, it could store 15 images on a single disk in a MVC-[incremental number here from 001].jpg format. I was really shocked to find how the FDD was just fast enough to save a small movie on it. Dat FDD seek noise tho. Love those times.
The Mavica brings me back! Had both the 5 and the 87 at a job in the late 90s and early 2000s and would borrow them on weekends all the time. I'd fill up a box of disks easy on a weekend or at a party, you couldn't beat it at the time. Took so many pics with friends back then we even had our own website just to host them, being that time before social media. The Mavica was a big part of our lives back then and has a special place in my memory. At the time, it was simply the best digital camera you could have with its price, performance and storage. Only being limited to how many floppies you'd bring with you. Great piece of tech history. In my opinion was probably one of the most important digital cameras ever released. Thanks for the jog down memory lane, this is a camera that shouldn't be forgotten. Highly recommend getting your hands on the successor CD Mavica which used miniCDs, which possibly could compete some digital cameras still out there today in image quality. While not as memorable or as common as the Floppy Mavica's, the CD Mavica was certainly an interesting fork in the digital camera family tree.
You need to get one of those micro SD to memory stick adapters and put it into the floppy disk and see what happens.
Ha, now there's an idea.
I found the memory stick floppy adapter the coolest part of the video.
+LGR I’ll make it better! Take a MicroSD to Memory Stick adapter, put a MicroSD card in there, put it in that Memory Stick to floppy adapter, then see if you can’t copy Duke Nukem 3D to it an run it. I winder just how slow the transfer rates would be? XD
@@LGR According to my research about the floppy disk adapter, it has its own file system and data is not presented in the memory sticks in a straight forward way. It requires a Windows 95/98 PC with a floppy disk slot and proprietary driver installed. My adapter works on MVC-FD88 but my PC won't read the MS card installed inside it.
Fuck no floppies forever
Thank you for opening up waves of nostalgia for me with this video :) My father loved his FD88 when he got it & when he passed away in 2004 his widow sent it to me,it does not work & I've no use for it but just can not bring myself to throw it out...still in storage to this day
I'm genuinely shocked at that image quality. I wouldn't actually be opposed to use that as a vacation shooter even today.
Yeah it's not bad at all, especially the slightly later models!
My grandmother had one when I was like 14. It was "out of date" when I started trying to get a decent camera around 02, but that Damn camera always irritated me by being so Damn good in many ways.... The images were clearer than my newer cameras with higher MP sensors, it compressed them nicely to fit a bunch on a floppy drive, and the floppy in the 4x speed models wrote an image in about 2sec - faster than processing and saving on whatever cameras I had. They really kept relevant for a while and bothered me by being "unbeatable" by my budget.
Considering a lot of people use instagram, which butchers resolution and quality, I don't think it would be too bad if you were uploading there
I still have a ton of pictures from the late 90s and early 2000s taken with the mavica, and many of them hold up very well. Back then if you offloaded to a PC and did some simple retouching with photoshop or paint shop pro, you'd end up with something that was fair to great depending on the lighting conditions, but rarely terrible. Those images have aged fairy well over the decades. A real testament to the quality of those cameras.
Paint Shop Pro 7 Anniversary Edition!!!
Kids these days will never know the feeling. When we had film you had to know how to take photos. You didn’t want a roll of blurred and dark photos coming back. When digital came out we all felt like the photos were unlimited and free because we could take as many as we wanted, delete or save, and do it again.
Floppy Disk noises always scared the crap out of me, I always felt like I was doing something wrong.
travos k the problem is when they don’t make noise when you try to read or write a disk
When I was a security guard in the early 2000s, our department got a Sony Mavica camera to replace the old Polaroid camera we had been using. I used to love using that camera and I still have a few pictures I snapped with it from around the office.
my dad had one of these back in the day. I used to run around the house holding a toy gun to make it look like I was in an FPS game.
You've had a great childhood then
This comment made me happy and sad at the same time. We never appreciated how much time we had to kill as children.
Today children just stare at Instagram on their phones and laptops.
Oh man, the pictures you took to stimulate its time period were wonderful.
I so love how you are able to take photos and make them look so old because of the location. I love it. Your selfie with the flash is so reminiscent of high school. I had so many washed out pics, lol. They were even considered good back then by most people online. You always looked cute washed out.
This brings back great memories from my high school yearbook staff days! I would roam the halls with this very camera taking thousands of photos over the course of two years as yearbook editor. I was CONSTANTLY in need of 3.5" floppies during that time. It really was an incredibly convenient format.
Nice!! I was my middle school photographer and this was the same camera I used to get yearbook pics. Nothing but fond memories until I remember trying to get action shots.
yesterday I found my old sony handycam and watched some 12+ year old footage of me and my buddys skating and being stupid.
...those times
If it was miniDV, the quality is still very good. Standard Definition miniDV can look way better than crap compressed HD.
naaaww, its Hi8 :-P
The thing I love about you LGR is you get it, it's about the feel of the mechanical drive, the snap of the disk being ejected, the over-engineering of the entire device, it's a thing of beauty. I myself use my FD75 all the time, despite having access to my Nikon D7200 (which I also use a great deal) the FD75 has a special place in my heart and gives life to my old FDD's.
I sold so many of those cameras back in the day when I worked in the electronics store.
I remember carrying around a separate cell phone, a point and click camera, and a game boy back then.
Started to go back to that myself, modern phone, retro emulation handheld (ambernic RG351MP), any one of several new and retro cameras, even got a modern digital music player (Fiio M9).
No joke, it's actually great to not depend on a single device, with a single (non replaceable) battery, and devices built for certain tasks are deffinitly easier and more fun to use for those tasks, or just more cool, even if a backpack or messenger bag might be handy if you want it all at once
$599 USD...where have I heard that before?
It's on the tip of my tongue...seems like Sony has some love for that particular price point. Known for striking weak points for massive damage to our wallets.
Paused video looking for a comment just like this.
so here's this GIANT ENEMY CRAB
Or massive damage to their own economy, as it turned out.
Hmmmmmm. Definitely sounds familiar.
Sony member on stage: $599, $599,$599,$599
Clint, while many noted that other youtubers already touched this whole old cameras topic, I want you to remember that everyone has his own style of doing things, and that yours is one of the most pleasing. So thank you for everything you share with us. Can't wait for the next one! :)
Thanks, I always try to bring something fresh to the table even with previously well-covered topics :)
The first digital camera I ever used. For what it was, a decent little product.
This channel is a time machine to me. Your love of stuff from back in the day really shows and I love that. Thanks, Clint.
A whole day taking pictures with these Mavicas and you're ready for a neck brace for the rest of the week.
That's no joke. A stripped down laptop in 1999 wasn't much heavier.
Martin Kronström try carrying around a 5dsr with a 70-200 f2.8 if you want a workout.
My nikon d700 is just shy of 1kg, and yeah.. That's just for the camera itself ie without any lens..
Please, children. You don't know neck pain until you've shot a wedding with a 1D Mk II using a 70-200 2.8
Is it the camera that comes with a Chiropractors Coupon?
I have fond memories of this camera. My Dad received one from a friend at Sony to test, and he promptly passed it on to me. At the time I was into photography in a big way, and the ability to take photos and instantly see the result blew my tiny little mind.
The FAA is very familiar with this format to deal with mechanic complaints from Airlines. Literally every single piece of a plane During certain eras that was repaired was photographed buy a camera like this from every possible angle and documented hand written on the disc and stored in case a failure. Does anyone have any experience in this?
Oh man! This is the camera my parents had. All my childhood pictures were taken on this and have a box full of floppies in the attic somewhere. Lol I hope they're still intact. So cool to see it again.
I have about 4 of these one still sealed from walmart, pretty amazing cameras in the early 2000s . I could take close ups of marks signatures etc. for Ebay, people always asked what beatiful pics. What are you using?? My father and I still use these for antiques and really no need to upgrade. Price is great specially years after the $600 whopping price dropped like a ton of bricks. Id get them for around 50 the new one I got was 200 but thats not bad sealed. Slapping floppy discs in and out and sticking them in the pc was a piece of cake back then.
Imagine living in times where phones cost 1500 €+... These are the end times. Although the technology is also like a dream, when you were raised with trash level 90s and 2000s stuff. As a child I was happy when games opened at all, to me 640 x 480 15-25 FPS was "running" - I used to play CoD4 like that too for the first year, the laptop would shut off every two hours for a forced cooldown break. Still memorable times.
I used one of these in high school for newspaper when we wanted a quick picture (usually portraits) where we didn't want to spend the film and time to develop. Pretty handy in the day!
Oh my gosh! I collect the mavica cameras
how many do you have i have one
I have one somewhere from 2003
Me too. I love them! I think I have a video uploaded comparing the 3 I brought camping. I shoot an FD91 at the moment... and a bag full of discs.
nice I use a FD92 for Black and White photos, still think it takes the best. I actually use it at Independent Pro Wrestling events I go to in Chicago. Floppies is just too much to carry if I have to run for cover LOL i use a 128MB Stick
I need to find a disc converter. 20 discs is a pain. I get 4 or 5 pics per disc. Still pretty fun.
My father worked as an Traffic accident reconstruction investigator for the police department in my home town and there department used this series of FD cameras for there ease of use and access of files. They did issue newer models as they came out so it was really cool having the ability to use many different models of this camera and i loved them super easy to use and like many computer users of the times we had lots of Floppy Disks so we always had an abundance of media to which we could store images on until your video popped up on my feed today i had completely forgot about them very happy for the blast from the past keep up the great works...
I used to lust after the Mavica but I never got one.
My primary school had one of these that I remember using a lot in grade 6 (2002). From memory it could have been an FD75 - I'm desperately trying to remember the layout of the Power and Eject buttons! We didn't have a digital camera at home until 2004 so I was absolutely enamoured with the Mavica when I first used it, especially given how easy it was to access the photos. This was indeed a very enjoyable trip down memory lane.
08:13 - WOOD GRAIN FLOPPY DISK DRIVE, FTW!!
These old tech videos fill me with the STRANGEST sense of nostalgia and dread at the same time. I was born 1990 though so it might be because I only sort of remember the time before digital media became the absolute norm.
LGR is one of very few channels I acctually watch from start to finnish these days. Keep it coming
My school teacher used it in class to take photos of our class, I remember it was so fun it to use because we could see our photos right away on the computers.
I really don't know how but LGR talking about digital cameras is very soothing to me. Should watch this, have a drink, and sit back and relax one of these days.
I was still using disposables from CVS at the time...
Ryan Yoder You should go develop it before stores don't support disposables anymore.
I did a truck magazine photoshoot with the panorama kodak film camera disposable in 97 and still have the pics. They were excellent and kept me from the underwhelming digital cameras at the time. Waited till about 01 to go digital.
As much I might not know about computer related tech, is really nice to be educated on the most popular or unpopular items by someone who's definitely used to this I hope to see more grand content from you.
the images are surprisingly good
My father has been selling antiques on eBay since 1997 and he has a Digital Mavica that he used to take photos of merchandise all the way until 2016 when he finally switched over to using his iPhone for product photos. Hearing the beeps and mechanical floppy disk reader noises brings back so many memories.
I used to sell the crap outta these at Circuit City back in the day. The commission on them was insane
The very first digital camera I ever used was a Mavica! A high school teacher of mine let me use it for a project I think in 2002, not sure what model it was but I was blown away that it took 3.5" diskettes. I really want a FD5 now
I Owned the FD71. I remember bringing it to the office and my colleagues took photos of everything, including a candy jar and the inside of an empty bin.
Another great video. I enjoy these videos because it takes me back to a time when I was in college and enjoying life. Floppy drives. Zip drives. Windows 95. Love that time.
For some reason, red is really problematic for compression filters. You get a lot of compression artifacts around them in pretty much any compressor.
A side effect of good ol' chroma subsampling!
Yeah, I remember it always being super noticeable in FMVs on the original Playstation, even on my old, relatively tiny CRT.
Shockingly we were still using these in my college in 2006!
I don't find it terribly shocking, the image quality was good enough for student reports and the connivance of floppies was hard to beat. Why fix what wasn't broken?
Pro-Tip: that Mavica FD87 should support disk copy which does it at a low level so far anything i have tried in it (except disks lower than 1.44MB) and non variable speed was able to copy including system disks. And it does it at 4x.
In Denmark around 2001-2007, we used a variety of digital floppy cameras. They were great, and a fun experience, and it was my first experience with a digital camera. Thanks for a great video. Total nostalgic vibes!
I know someone else already said it, but stringing together dozens of LGR's videos with the volume levels dropped world make an awesome ASMR-style fall asleep channel!
I love the look back at old but important tech, but every time I hear him say 'FD-series' I keep thinking Mazdas...
Aerin Ravage I keep thinking how fucked the used enthusiast car market is. Muscle cars, euros, or JDM/imports, if it's at all desirable, prices are absolutely through the roof if it isn't a fixer uper
I admittedly will listen to old LGR videos (and other things) when trying to fall asleep. It's that sweet spot of interesting enough to hold my attention but not "energetic" enough to keep me awake. Gentle background music; a calm, friendly voice talking about casual topics and no loud, sudden noises. Makes me want to take a nap just thinking about it.
Just search LGR and turn autoplay on UA-cam on... Done!
I can’t express how fantastic these videos are. Thank you for making these. Just awesome.
I actually bought one from a garage sale about a year ago for $2 and I didn’t even know how to use it or even put photos into my computer off the floppy disk, it just looked so old and crappy that I knew I had to have it
I own a Cybershot from 2003, they're truly amazing at what they can do and I have taken modern photos with them that rival some stuff my smartphone can do in low light.
I owned one of these, I don't know if it was this exact model, but it was definitely a Sony Mavica using Floppy disks. :)
Same lol
Omg I miss the 90s soooooo much. I love this channel. Never stop.
Hmm, a camera that uses floppy disks as storage medium? Sound like a great way to lose your pictures... still a cool technology and a awesome video as always:)
More reliable than SmartMedia that came out around that time. Those cards actually short circuited if you put your fingers across the open terminals. They also bent really easy and lost all your data. Can't tell you how fondly I remember losing images - the only time I've ever lost any - with SmartMedia.
Oddly, I never suffered any data loss on a floppy disc, ever, before I got the chance to get them on "the next better thing". I did have a Lexar "USB enabled" CF card shit the bed and lost about 40 pictures though.
Floppy disk quality was garbage at that time, too.
Since you couldn't fit much on a floppy I imagine youd be transfering pictures to your pc pretty frequently..
Diskettes weren't as reliable as flash memory these days, but cheap, handy and compatible with any PC. Furthermore, the Mavica used FAT12, JPEG and didn't require any additional software. An ingenious choice for a consumer product.
I used to work at Wal-Mart's photo department and when we took over the electronics sections camera bar, this beauty was there and I absolutely loved it. It took great pictures and they looked like they came from an expensive camera. It's what made me fall in love with Sony products. I still have this camera and use it on occasions, I still love this piece of history and of course will continue to take care of it like a fine wine.
Huh, I actually own one of these. Or did, at any rate. Not sure if I still have it somewhere. Do hope so.
Thanks LGR, for taking me back to middle school computer class! We used some variation of these Mavica cameras, with a Lazy Susan, to create "360" Quicktime videos of still objects circa 2001/2002
Am i dreaming or was there a camera that used a 2.88mb floppy disk as storage?
To the best of my knowledge there was no such camera. But there were two Panasonic models that used the LS-120 superdisk and one that used Iomega Clik disks - perhaps you're thinking of them?
I must have been thinking of those then , thank you for helping me to remember.
I believe Sony developed the 2.88 for the Mavica but I can't remember if they ever released one with it. By the time the drives and media were getting affordable enough to be a force in the market, floppies were dying in droves as zip drives, USB, and multiple gigabyte hard drives were becoming a thing. That all happened right about the same time that compact flash became a player in the camera market, thus murdering just about everything else until the SD card came along.
Maxwelhse very intriguing thank you for the information.
It was because of the floppy drive Mavica that I have so many pics of my kids when they were little in the 90s- it was so easy to grab a bunch of discs and keep shooting on trips or even just candids. Before that it was a hassle to get the pics onto the pc and use them. I enjoyed it and am grateful for it.
lol even today this camera could have it's use, with that resolution being ideal for instagram
Oh man this brings back memories of middle school. I remember when I was in shop class, we had to build a C02 powered race car and for some reason we had to take a picture of the car. We used either this camera (or a similar camera) and I just remember that it used a floppy disk and it blew my mind! Funny enough I brought this up when me and my friend were watching a earlier video of yours, so its funny that you made this video.
It dosent take good pictures,
Ｂｕｔ ｉｔ ｔａｋｅｓ ｇｏｏｄ
ｐｉｃｔｕｒｅｓ
If you catch my drift.
Your channel is a God-Send! Never stop making videos!
Remember around Christmas time Radioshack would have all the badass Rc cars in stock? that was awesome. I had a red arrow.
Hi LGR! This one hit a soft spot... Had one of these (the crappiest one) Mavicas in elementary and it was one of the weirdest pieces of tech I'd seen at the time. Great to see it wasn't just a myth! ;)
New drinking game: take a shot each time you heard fd in this video
Oh man, Iove the Mavica. I used this camera, specifically the FD87 all throughout high school. Wonderful piece of kit. Thanks for doin this review.
I saw a sony mavica at a thrift store
CalculatinGenius goodwill???
it was at another place, i forgot what it was called, but it was a thrift store
CalculatinGenius Salvation Army?
bargain center
10:37 that optical zoom there is honestly beautiful, that strikes me as such a sharp image for a camera of its day.
I owned one of these
Edit: The 1997 one with 10x zoom.
I honestly don't think anything is as convenient as these cameras. Floppy disks were all over the place, and were so cheap you could just label them add toss them in a caddy. While new cameras can store tons of images on an sd card; there's so many images and the cards are so small it isn't as nice for stashing away. Such a nice camera, and was useful way past it's date.
Uhhh... My modern camera has a 64GB card in it... I don't have need to stash it away as I literally can't take that many pictures in a day, a week, or potentially a year. Drop it in the USB 3.0 reader at the end of my adventures and a few minutes later I can make as many copies as I want and preserve them forever across dozens of other easy to use and massive storage mediums. I can even burn a Bluray disc of my most precious memories (for my entire life so far... I doubt I have more than 50gb of personal photos) and take it into work to safe guard them against fire.
Floppies are one of the great many things I don't miss about the past. Right about the time a "meh" level game was coming on 6 disks and a normal hard drive was over 1GB, 1.44MB was just huge pain in the ass.