My Goooooooooooooooooooood I love these series Gordon!!! I was a child when these came out and I remember going to the electronics retailers, seeing these and absolutely drooling over the dream of one day being able to have one! At that time, my parents shot with 35mm Nikon SLRs and I was already totally smitten about digital photography, video and computers! Thanks again for the video.. love it and brings back so wonderful memories :) :) :)
Thanks again Gordon!!! I wanted to add the the story, MY FIRST digital camera, MANY MANY years later, eneded up being a Sony DSC-F828, present from my parents at the time! Oh God how much I loved AND STILL LOVE this camera.. I still have it, still working like new and still taking awesome photos. A very unique and special camera and one I would absolutely love to see you review one day. Back then, digital photography was so exciting.. new designs every year, new groundbreaking advancements every year, new amazing products every year. I must admit, now digital cameras are of amazing IQ and features (I shoot professionally with a GFX100 and own several Sony mirrorlesses). Yes, these new cameras are great and the tech in them is unimaginable compared to when the DSC-F828 was released. BUT, excitement like things were 20 years ago??? Nothing! The truly exciting days of digital photography are long gone. We live now in the times of ever improving pixel-perfection-boredom. I really miss the exciting times! Thanks again for your wonderful reviews and channel, love :)
Another wonderful review, thanks Gordon. I had the joy of receving a picture taken on this camera by my friend who lived overseas, while on the phone to her (at great expense!) she said she'd borrowed the Mavica from work and took a selfie and emailed it to me so I hung up, dialled my ISP, waited 5 mins to download the email with the picture attached and thought how wonderful technology was.
Back in 1998 took some photos for a band with one of those, which were later printed by the record company into their CD booklet. Looked rather good, despite the VGA resolution 😁
The school my dad worked at had a Mavica FD7 (one the 10x optical zoom) and he brought it home once to show it to me. I remember the zoom seeming incredible but low light performance was so bad you simply couldn't expose anything under standard artificial lighting. Also I remember there being a high quality setting (possibly .BMP) where it took minutes to write a single image and that one image filled up a whole floppy disc 😂 I'm loving the channel, it's great to look back and see how far things have come 🙂
Watching this brings me back to the good old days where you appreciate any new tech that comes out. unlike nowadays where we complaint about missing features of almost every camera that comes out.. I must say I have so much Fun watching all your retro reviews. BIG THANK YOU. have a coffee on me.
Yes yes yes! This is the UA-cam channel I've been looking for, plenty of vintage tech youtuber but your product style is something special! You've earned a sub
Love this nostalgia series. I wasn't around for most of these old cameras (or they weren't around where I live), but it's fascinating to learn about the rise of digital photography and the different technologies that were invented to make it possible. P.S. Also, that forest bokeh in the beginning looks buttery smooth!
Great video Gordon. I think they are a fantastic piece of design - we might think of them as being strange now but utilising that everyday object the floppy disc you could be up and running and adding photos to you desk top publishing file or web page almost instantly. When the internet was strangled by 56k/second dial up, those low res files weren't a problem, similarly with e-mail with file size limits. The Mavica was the most practical of solutions out there, no wonder they sold well.
You inspired me to go dig through my closet and find mine! Unfortunately, my battery no longer works as you mentioned, but I did find the Mavica! Turns out mine is an FD75 model. May have to find a USB floppy drive and a battery and go play with it some time. Lots of memories with this old thing!
You have to love Sony and the amount of products they churned out to see if it would take off. I have a Mavica floppy based camera still and recently bought new batteries for it which also fit my Sony Digital 8 handycam. Still lots of fun to use and with a USB FDD easy to use on modern pcs.
Seriously considering getting a case with two drive bays just do I can load in a bluray drive and a floppy drive, partly out of spite for current trends and because it's still useful to be able to read all those media types, especially since I just found a Mavica FD75 so having a more substantial floppy drive would be nice even if USB floppy drives work well enough to start
About this time Viz comic had a cartoon which said, don't worry if you haven't got a digital camera, simply use your film camera and build the shot with Lego! The resolution was the same.
Gordon, I enjoy your channel very much. Only used a Sony Mavica once at a party when my analog compact broke. Had the digital files transferred to a CD by a local Apple retailer since I did not have a floppy drive on my iMac. A classic digital camera I own, still love and use from time to time, is the Leica Digilux 2. The Panasonic counterpart is the Lumix DMC-LC1.
I remember testing the LC1, and hope to cover it again on this channel at some point. Yes, the irony behind Sony's cunning plan was that at around the same time they released the Mavica, Apple ditched floppy drives!
great video i own 2 fd-73 1 fd-91 1 fd 200 i still really like taking photos with these cameras and for its age the fd200 photos look quite decent for only 2mp even some mid range phones with higher MP take worse photos them my fd200
CCD sensors are funny like that, they were actually pretty great at they're job but weren't nearly as fast as modern CMOS sensors among other issues so they got overtaken for the most part. Some applications like Astrophotography still use CCDs because they are really good at the long exposures and extreme sensitivity requirements of trying to image dim galaxies, nebulae, and other stellar sights, CMOS "can" manage but they generate a lot more visual noise during long exposure while also not being quite as efficient at catching every photon to make a clear, clean image. Even with just a regular DSLR though Astrophotography is fun, you don't need a specialized astronomy camera to capture some really beautiful pictures
Wonderful video Gordon, seems that you like this retro adventure as well ! Very strange that Sony put the disc in the wrong way on the poster @1:12 🤔 Equally interesting is that the trademarks Stamina, and info Lithium Still exists to this day. ("Fun" fact I actually used a 3,5" floppy just a couple of months ago when rebooting a ABB insustrial robot manufactured in 1998)
A friend of mind had one of these cameras! This is a great series Gordon, thank you for devoting so much time to these type of videos. No matter what the limitations of the camera, your creativity still shines through But a thought… Imagine if the development of the floppy disc had continued beyond the 3.5 inch 1.44 MB disc in the same way that spinning disc hard drives has exploded over the years to crazy capacities. This type of camera might still be practical for something like Instagram or similar!
When I took that photo of you in the cafe, it took so long I thought it had switched off! Imagine having to wait that long for a digital photo now….I owned one of these but I must have a selective memory about waiting for the images to record. Strangely the exit data on the images I found don’t have the camera model number on them - perhaps something that wasn’t around at the time?
Hi and thank you so much for a really nice video about the first Mavica. Yes, I was one of those people who got one in 1997; I loved it, held onto it for at least ten years, then stupidly sold it! I now have a Mavica back again and love it once more; this time I am not letting go of it! I am going to try to get a few different models of it as well, but I am just grateful to have one once again. Cheers!
Wonderfully thought out and executed review. Thank you! I remember buying a Sony miniDV camcoder in 2002. One of the selling points of the model I chose was the presence of a slot for a Sony Magicgate memory stick and the ability to record stills on it at the incredible resolution of 1 megapixel! Good times.
We had one of these in 1997/1998. I remember using it in photo class of high school for a “different medium”, because we were shooting B&W film by default.
@@DinoBytes I remember thinking it was a joke and not a real photography tool. That said all our film photos were physical. We had no way to scan for uploading onto computer.
That was my first digital camera, and I held onto it for a few years after it was definitely obsolete simply because of the convenience of the floppy discs. Surely every computer would always have a floppy drive, right?
My fancy, VR capable modern desktop is going to be getting a USB floppy drive installed shortly, since I just found a Mavica FD75, sure it stands no chance against my EOS Rebel T6 it doesn't matter, sometimes is more fun to work with something limited and weird rather than the modern standard
I worked for a company in the mid-late 90s that sold cameras and software to orthodontists and oral surgeons. We sold these specifically, then the Fuji DS-220 (640x480) with a macro attachment, later the Nikon Coolpix 900 (1.3MP). It was an amazing time seeing the industry change so quickly.
Thanks Gordon. Mine's a functional MVC-FD83 with its original battery + charger, strap, lens cap, and assorted body stickers all faded to the point of illegibility. There's considerable rubbing down to bare plackiness (placking, not brassing :) around the shutter button. The camera's paid for itself many times over shooting listings for an estate agency.
Oh man, the gloriously garish jaggies! There’s something about low res, jaggy and interlaced images from the late 90s to the mid 00s. Lots of nostalgia right there. I remember pouring over Sony’s PULSE magazine in the early-mid 00s absorbing their consumer electronic offerings. Among the products that caught my eye was Sony’s Mavica lineup, especially the MVC-CD400. A digital camera that can record onto CDs?! It blew my mind. 20 years later and I still want one.
I bought one back in '99 when I was 12 years old. I still own it and am still using it now in 2024. It has a pretty impressive build; mine has never been repaired, so every mechanical part is still original, but I do regular cleaning maintenance.
Awesome, I've still got a fully working FD87 and 20 floppy discs. Likewise I use an external floppy disc reader to get the images onto my laptop. Great fun, I still get mine out now and again 😁
Used one of these for taking images of the machinery in the Cadbury factory where I worked in the early nineties. It was a revelation at the time as we moved up from a Kodak that could store 6 images from memory.
These take me back to the time when I was a little kid and digital photography was just starting to build its ground. I remember my aunt gave us a Fujifilm point & shoot digital camera and it had a 2MP resolution (which I considered really high back then) with a 32 MB XD picture card.
This is the review I have been waiting for! A trip down memory lane. I had the FD7! I also was drawn to the flexibility of using floppies. Other cameras of the time had cables to connect but that was before USB was a proper standard, so there were cumbersome drivers to install and other complications. The floppy disk was fab! I had the Memory Stick reader too. It was faster and higher capacity. But the picture quality was rubbish and the camera was too big. Around 2000 I went back to film with a tiny APS camera. I wish I still had my FD7, I gave it away a long time ago. Ah well, fun times!
Sony is a company with a rich history of trying things out and the floppy series cameras are a cool reminder of what creativity can create! I like that the battery for that camera is so used that you can get a good one today! Have a good weekend!
Thanks Gordon,interesting video about the Mavica,the earliest digital camera I have is a Ricoh RDC-300Z which uses a smart media card,it came free with a Tiny computer I bought many years ago.The camera still worked last time I checked a few months ago
mine was the 7 version with the 10 times zoom only 9 images to a disc but i was using the highest quailty etc. would always count off the seconds to the next shot. also a slight delay in taking the shot so for me taking action shots you sort of had to predict where the shot was going to be. images were perfect for my website at the time though. pockets bulging with discs one with full ones and one with new ones. great camera.
I'm Brighton based and was working in San Fransisco when they first came out. I actually queued in line to get one. Computers were only VGA or XVGA anyway so the quality was fine, much better then I could get with a photo and my blank and white Logitech hand scanner. I upgraded it a year layer to an Olympus C-820 with XGA (1024x768) resolution and I remember I was blown away by the image quality. This was 1998 though, and the quality was in a different world than the Leica I use now.
Takes me back to the days when AOL bought my “film”. (That’s the primary reason why I chose this particular camera for my first digital.) It was far from perfect - but it was good enough to convince me that digital was the future. Mine was passed off to a local school’s “gifted students” program once I’d replaced it.
Love your videos Gordon, it brings back memories of drooling over these hi-tech cameras back in the day. Yes, remember these but never bought one though because back then I thought the quality wasn't as good compared to film, well... not yet, and they were quite expensive. Talking about disk cameras I came across a camera made by Sharp and it records pictures on MD disks at the flea market. Not sure if this was marketed outside Japan though.
Nice review. Did you know there was an improved version, the FD51, having a few extra features including one that does not seem to be documented, the lens mount is threaded for filters and supplementary lens.It's an odd size though, 26mm. Tiffen produced a kit for this camera containing tele, wide angle and close up lens, all having 37mm threads and a 26mm to 37mm adaptor.
Hi Gordon, yes I owned it and it was my very first digital camera. I had a commercial photo studio and each year I would do a shoot for a client who needed lots of shots of products that they might include in a catalog at a later date. I always shot film and after it was processed they did a slide show for their buyers to see which products would make the final cut for inclusion later in the catalog. I didn't charge my client a lot to do these preliminary pictures as I would later make more shooting the catalog for them. In 1997 they asked if I could take the pictures with this Sony camera that had just come out. We would shoot as their trade show was starting and then they could show their buyers the product in what was an early version of a PowerPoint program. I agreed and said if they bought me the camera I would not charge for taking the pictures for their presentation. I was so excited to have my first digital camera and still own it.
Thanks for your memories! I loved how these were used in so many pro environments. Possibly one of the most used cameras for this kind of thing thanks to the ease of accessing the images.
@@DinoBytes Yes the Sony TRV-900 has 3CCD and the card bus adapter is removable so you can swap the memory stick cardbus for the FDD. So you have the somehow hold the floppy drive while holding the camera to take stills :) I just today had to repack the battery pack for a Sony Vaio UX UMPC with new 18650 cells because unlike the mavica camera the UMPC used a special battery that I can not find online anymore but it now works great again :) The Vaio UX takes quite good pics for its age considering it's a windows 7 pc and the first ever pc to have an SSD drive 32GB. Really enjoying your videos by the way :)
I remember when I was in high school, they had a similar camera, but it was I think a MVC-FD87. They protected that camera like it was made of gold. I never got to use it, but I always thought it was pretty cool. Over the years I've somehow managed to get two cameras, MDC-FD5 and the MVC-FD87. I remember getting the FD87, a friend of mine's girlfriend left it in my 73 Datsun 620 Pickup. I offered it back to her a few times, but she didn't want it back. The FD5, I don't remember getting the camera. Anyways I charged both batteries, only one took charge. Both cameras powered on, but only the FD5 actually writes to floppy, other one has disk error. I'm a fan of retro things, its really cool that one of the two cameras I have actually works.
Sold these cameras in college and used one for many projects. It was a marvelous piece of tech! So much better than Apple’s QuickTake. Great video thanks for sharing!
Great review as always! This is surely an interesting device. Also nice to hear your experience with it from your work. Anecdotes like this are the icing on the cake. This adapter is also very interesting - I really wonder how big the capacity is it can read. I still got some memory sticks laying around, from my Sony R1 time 😎
Do you still have the R1? That was a lovely camera! As for the adapter I suspect it'll work with any card, but may only recognise the first, say, 64MB of it. If I ever get hold of one I'll tell you!
@@DinoBytes No, I sold it back then, when I was switching in whole to DSLR. As much as I liked it, the AF and continuous shooting speed were too slow for my needs. Yes, this adapter would be very interesting! I wonder if it also works in a PC floppy drive 😁
When my first grandchild was born, my son rushed in said dad give me your digital camera, and of course it was the Sony MAVICA FD5, about an hour or so later the photos were on my computer, and as my grandchild celebrated his 23rd birthday yesterday, I can see those same photo 3 computers later, and in the bright lights of the hospital, they look very good.
@@DinoBytes I can’t tell exactly, ironically the picture is too low res to tell. It’s a local auction house so I might pop on Monday and check it out in person. It’s definitely a floppy disc model though.
Probably ruined a ton of floppy discs by playing with the gates and putting my fingers on the disc itself. Fun times. Fascinating stuff to me back in the day.
okay call me weird but i want one of these because i feel it would beautiful for taking nostalgic, and liminal space photos just because of the artifacts, low res, the colors, ect its honestly a beauty
I have seen them in thrift stores I had a few with the floppies but couldn't take very many pictures on the floppy so I gave them to my nephew to practice on .Since then however I found a floppy that was later available as in your video that could add a memory stick or something like that .If I find another i might buy it just to have .I think I have most of the MVC mini disc cameras from my MVC 1000 to the last newest being I think 5 meg ,.I love using this vintage stuff it makes photography more fun .
My Camera has arrived DSC F-1 pretty cool and I just downloaded the instructional manual ,I thought it included any how I will read the book first and I have a older PC with windows XP to load the software disc ,Stay Tuned .Am happy so far .this camera is really cool if nothing else 👍👍👍
I had no idea you could get a USB floppy disk reader. Great. Now I’m going to make another ridiculous purchase because of one of your videos! Question- did this thing write EXIF info?
@@DinoBytes My recollection is of thinking they looked "awful" - then again my benchmark at the time was shooting high quality images with high quality prime lenses on 35mm, or my Yashica TLR, or my Busch Pressman 45D 4x5. Yet - Still wanting one!
High Gordon, I'm currently in process of collecting early Sony digital cameras. I already have several of there key models, like the DSC R1 and F828, the H1 and H2, the Mavica range recently caught my attention, and yes I'm looking at several models on my favourite buying site, as an aside, I thought the images you took looked very film like in appearance. As for the Mavica, not sure which model should be my first... many thanks.
I don't really remember what was our family's first camera but from what I know, my mom used a Yashica rangefinder starting around the late 80's (which is still in working order to this day). She and my dad went with several cameras along the years with some even using MMC cards and the last point-and-shoot they bought was a Sony DSC-W320 (currently in my possession). Around 2015 they bought our first DSLR, a Canon 1200D. Upto that point, I mainly use my phone as my camera and when I first used the 1200D and shot raw, that was when I was hooked with the power that even a basic DSLR had. I used that camera for a long time until I accidentally lost it in 2019. In 2020, I was able to replace it with a Canon 50D which I still daily drive to this day. My country is still in lockdown but during the pre-COVID era, I would bring my camera to school every day and me and friends would just have fun shooting with it. It's amazing how even older DSLRs can still produce stunning results when used properly. I can't wait to go back out and shoot again.
I remember reviewing the 50D, it was an still is a strong camera. When I was studying, I had an old film SLR and loved taking candid photos of my friends. Quality isn't paramount there, it's capturing precious moments.
I have three of these in my collection, two FD75s and an FD100 or 200 (Can't remember which, the only difference was the megapixel count) Absolutely love how goofy they are, I really need to get some batteries for them so I can take them out. Thankfully I have wall power supplies for them. All three came from a school at some point. It must be said that ejecting a floppy on the later models was even more satisfying, moving the eject lever sideways and the sliding it down! A really neat feature on the 100/200 was the screen, if you look along the top there's a weird translucent bar across that would actually take ambient light in to illuminate the display.
AH yes I remember those sceens! As for chargers, my second hand one didn't come with one BUT I was able to use the third party charger I use to charge the bigger batteries for my HDMI recorder - nice to have a standard fitting!
I didn't own one of them, but do remember selling them. Estate agents found them useful for the reasons you mentioned. The first digital I purchased was a Kodak DC25 which used CF cards. I bought a Sony DSC S70 was convinced digital was the way forward!
I have 5 Mavicas I love them I still use the MVC 1000 on a regular basis the best thing is that I have every mini cd saved since I purchased it new in the 90's I have since purchased most of the MVC's up to the 5 meg on the mini Cd ,the only thing that changed was that you must use a pc .Macintosh stopped any software with os-10 so I have a few pc's for that but they rugged and it without intending it i started a collection of them ,and the mini cd's get still be bought online .
Just got FD5 off eBay. A technical question please. Where the camera keeps time and date for each image file? After all most of Mavicas including this one don't put an exif header to images. Another files on a floppy are .411 - thumbnails used for Index viewing. You can delete them and still able to see .jpg images. The only idea I have is the camera's floppy drive records time and date for each image at floppy itself and then reads it back. Any other ideas?
My first digital camera was a Panasonic NV-DCF2 with a princely 0.35MP (I think). It gave grainy pictures with limited exposure control - but it was DIGITAL and probably no worse than some of the cheap Polaroids. Of course, printing and photo-manipulation software was also way behind what we enjoy now. I still have the camera somewhere in a box and this video just might inspire me to go and find it for some retro-pictures.
Cheers mate, just came to see if you’d done this yet! You’ve inspired me to leave it in the box it’s stored in ha ha However, I may raid the box to see if the batteries fit an old A65 I have. Shit at low light, but still damn good for sports on a sunny day.
@@DinoBytes Hmm… mavica I have to buy discs and a drive for and get crappy shots, or the beauty I just spent good-used-car money on…? I may need to think abou- Nah. 😉
I used to be a pediatrician and I used a Polaroid to take pictures of all my newborn patients (always including their parents so I'd remember them if they called). After a stay on my bulletin board (a real, not digital one) they went into the baby's chart. My Polaroid died, so I replaced it with one of these and printed out the images on an ink jet. Between the low resolution of the Sony and the primitive ink jet, the pictures weren't good but satisfactory. My most vivid memory was taking the camera to a concert in which my about 10 yr old daughter was singing. I then took the camera home and emailed the pic†uses to my brother 3000 miles away. Both he and I were amazed at the ease and speed of sharing the pictures. It was a real eye opener. I realized what a game changer digital photography could be. I used the Sony camera in the office for several years, but bought myself a Canon G1 for my own use.
Found a sony Mavica FD75 for 2$ at a thrift store, eagerly ordered a new battery, a pack of freash floppies, and a USB floppy drive for my desktop. It's a a seemingly absurd device to have hanging beside my EOS Rebel T6, yet I adore the retro hardware and eagerly await the confusion and questions is someone sees me using this thing, especially when that floppy drive starts accessing with those rather distinctive sounds
Loving this series on the old cameras! I would have been happy with one of these Sony Mavica FD cameras but unfortunately I bought a Casio QV which had terrible battery life on AA batteries, slow serial transfer of the photos, and image quality about the same as the Sony. Maybe my Casio had a fault but it would chew through a set of alkaline batteries in about 15 minutes just by having it turned on! I watched the Sony review on a smartphone & the image quality looked pretty nice. Back in those days many people would have had 12 or 14 inch monitors so the small file sizes would have been o.k.
Thanks to you I had to have the very first Sony digital The DSC F-1 I found one on E-bay I think the guy was happy to unload it and replied quickly to my offer .It has the camera and the software Cd and all the cables and the instructional manual .I can't wait to see it ,I'll keep you posted .One thing those optics are so high quality that my MVC 1000 still puts out great very clear high quality pictures and the later ones with 5 meg pixels and the Zeiss optics aside from being a little slower are still some of the best cameras .the DSC F-717 is also still one of the highest quality affordable camera .Its fun using vintage cameras especially the ones that were the most advanced and high quality of their day.And the great thing about using the MVC cameras is I have every cd since I bought the camera in 1998 or 1999 so I can always access all events and recopy pictures that had they been on a Sd card would now be long gone .
You'll love the DSC F1, it's amazing! I'm trying to collect ALL the F series models, but the asking prices sometimes are a little ambitious to say the least!
Images look great considering they're only 1/3 megapixel. My first digital camera was a Polaroid which had no LCD screen in the back, can't remember the exact model (PDC something, I guess).
Weeeell, I did a test and if you turn the JPEG compression all the down to about 1 or 2 in photoshop, you can get some - horrible looking - but very small files!
The FD71 was the first digital camera I got to use on a regular basis back in 1999/2000. A work colleague had one and I used it regularly for staff photos and the like… resolution was rather limited (compared to flat bed scanning a 4x6” print) but with good light the quality wasn’t terrible. Floppies of course were massively cheaper than solid state media of the era, but ironically upgrading to the then new and floppy-less PowerMac G4 made accessing the photos kinda annoying 😂
I'm rather glad that my last SLR camera didn't kick the bucket until 2003, because it seems that the quality of the early digital photographs wasn't up to much, though I can see the development of such new tech must have been very exciting at the time, particularlry for those who could see where it was all going.
great explanation, funny to see that today a $300 cellphone takes much better pictures then those expansive cameras. I became a photography enthusiast after digital photography started.
Had the FD7 not too long after it was released. My first digital camera. Cost nearly a months wages, about NZ$1399 on special, saving a couple of hundred dollars. Was okay, but resolution was a letdown, and slow record speed was not ideal.
My Goooooooooooooooooooood I love these series Gordon!!! I was a child when these came out and I remember going to the electronics retailers, seeing these and absolutely drooling over the dream of one day being able to have one! At that time, my parents shot with 35mm Nikon SLRs and I was already totally smitten about digital photography, video and computers! Thanks again for the video.. love it and brings back so wonderful memories :) :) :)
You are very welcome! I was really looking forward to making this one!
Thanks again Gordon!!! I wanted to add the the story, MY FIRST digital camera, MANY MANY years later, eneded up being a Sony DSC-F828, present from my parents at the time! Oh God how much I loved AND STILL LOVE this camera.. I still have it, still working like new and still taking awesome photos. A very unique and special camera and one I would absolutely love to see you review one day. Back then, digital photography was so exciting.. new designs every year, new groundbreaking advancements every year, new amazing products every year. I must admit, now digital cameras are of amazing IQ and features (I shoot professionally with a GFX100 and own several Sony mirrorlesses). Yes, these new cameras are great and the tech in them is unimaginable compared to when the DSC-F828 was released. BUT, excitement like things were 20 years ago??? Nothing! The truly exciting days of digital photography are long gone. We live now in the times of ever improving pixel-perfection-boredom. I really miss the exciting times! Thanks again for your wonderful reviews and channel, love :)
@@yuidfbse thanks! I remember very fondly reviewing the 828 and I almost bought one this week on eBay but the seller pulled it - bah!
Another wonderful review, thanks Gordon. I had the joy of receving a picture taken on this camera by my friend who lived overseas, while on the phone to her (at great expense!) she said she'd borrowed the Mavica from work and took a selfie and emailed it to me so I hung up, dialled my ISP, waited 5 mins to download the email with the picture attached and thought how wonderful technology was.
That's brilliant! It really was a brave new world!
Back in 1998 took some photos for a band with one of those, which were later printed by the record company into their CD booklet. Looked rather good, despite the VGA resolution 😁
Excellent! Have they since become famous?
The school my dad worked at had a Mavica FD7 (one the 10x optical zoom) and he brought it home once to show it to me. I remember the zoom seeming incredible but low light performance was so bad you simply couldn't expose anything under standard artificial lighting.
Also I remember there being a high quality setting (possibly .BMP) where it took minutes to write a single image and that one image filled up a whole floppy disc 😂
I'm loving the channel, it's great to look back and see how far things have come 🙂
thanks!
Watching this brings me back to the good old days where you appreciate any new tech that comes out. unlike nowadays where we complaint about missing features of almost every camera that comes out.. I must say I have so much Fun watching all your retro reviews. BIG THANK YOU. have a coffee on me.
Cheers, much appreciated! And I agree, we all loved this tech when it was evolving in the early days...
Seriously cool camera! Awesome work getting some nice pictures out of it. I do like the look of those files.
Agreed the colors are gorgeous
Yes yes yes! This is the UA-cam channel I've been looking for, plenty of vintage tech youtuber but your product style is something special! You've earned a sub
Thankyou, many more to come including the legendary GameBoy camera later today!
Love this nostalgia series. I wasn't around for most of these old cameras (or they weren't around where I live), but it's fascinating to learn about the rise of digital photography and the different technologies that were invented to make it possible.
P.S. Also, that forest bokeh in the beginning looks buttery smooth!
Thanks! I filmed my pieces to camera with a Sony A6400 and e 24mm f1.8 at f1.8 for this one.
This is gold, damn!!! love it! your channel should have millions of views! just shared it to many friends ;)
Thankyou! Many more to come!
Great video Gordon. I think they are a fantastic piece of design - we might think of them as being strange now but utilising that everyday object the floppy disc you could be up and running and adding photos to you desk top publishing file or web page almost instantly. When the internet was strangled by 56k/second dial up, those low res files weren't a problem, similarly with e-mail with file size limits. The Mavica was the most practical of solutions out there, no wonder they sold well.
Exactly, I think people who weren't around then don't understand just how slow and hard it was to work with digital images.
Cool! and thanks for another installment on these retro cameras. Fun watching.
Thanks, many more to come!
Great video thanks Gordon -- Love the original stickers on the camera... there must be a video about those... to peel or not to peel...
On my Sony S70 video you can see I peeled them off, but then stuck them to the base!
You inspired me to go dig through my closet and find mine! Unfortunately, my battery no longer works as you mentioned, but I did find the Mavica! Turns out mine is an FD75 model. May have to find a USB floppy drive and a battery and go play with it some time. Lots of memories with this old thing!
Yep with a new battery you should be ok
Love the series. Thank you for making this channel !
Thanks! many more to come soon!
You have to love Sony and the amount of products they churned out to see if it would take off. I have a Mavica floppy based camera still and recently bought new batteries for it which also fit my Sony Digital 8 handycam. Still lots of fun to use and with a USB FDD easy to use on modern pcs.
Great to hear you've got it working again!
Seriously considering getting a case with two drive bays just do I can load in a bluray drive and a floppy drive, partly out of spite for current trends and because it's still useful to be able to read all those media types, especially since I just found a Mavica FD75 so having a more substantial floppy drive would be nice even if USB floppy drives work well enough to start
About this time Viz comic had a cartoon which said, don't worry if you haven't got a digital camera, simply use your film camera and build the shot with Lego! The resolution was the same.
Ha ha! Yeah, you wouldn't need many bricks...
Gordon, I enjoy your channel very much. Only used a Sony Mavica once at a party when my analog compact broke. Had the digital files transferred to a CD by a local Apple retailer since I did not have a floppy drive on my iMac. A classic digital camera I own, still love and use from time to time, is the Leica Digilux 2. The Panasonic counterpart is the Lumix DMC-LC1.
I remember testing the LC1, and hope to cover it again on this channel at some point. Yes, the irony behind Sony's cunning plan was that at around the same time they released the Mavica, Apple ditched floppy drives!
great video
i own
2 fd-73
1 fd-91
1 fd 200
i still really like taking photos with these cameras and for its age the fd200 photos look quite decent for only 2mp even some mid range phones with higher MP take worse photos them my fd200
CCD sensors are funny like that, they were actually pretty great at they're job but weren't nearly as fast as modern CMOS sensors among other issues so they got overtaken for the most part.
Some applications like Astrophotography still use CCDs because they are really good at the long exposures and extreme sensitivity requirements of trying to image dim galaxies, nebulae, and other stellar sights, CMOS "can" manage but they generate a lot more visual noise during long exposure while also not being quite as efficient at catching every photon to make a clear, clean image.
Even with just a regular DSLR though Astrophotography is fun, you don't need a specialized astronomy camera to capture some really beautiful pictures
Wonderful video Gordon, seems that you like this retro adventure as well !
Very strange that Sony put the disc in the wrong way on the poster @1:12 🤔
Equally interesting is that the trademarks Stamina, and info Lithium Still exists to this day.
("Fun" fact I actually used a 3,5" floppy just a couple of months ago when rebooting a ABB insustrial robot manufactured in 1998)
Yes, I was a little triggered by the floppy the wrong way round in that advert, but it dd make it easier to see what it was.
Informative and fun....always entertaining...thankyou Gordon
You're very welcome!
A friend of mind had one of these cameras! This is a great series Gordon, thank you for devoting so much time to these type of videos. No matter what the limitations of the camera, your creativity still shines through
But a thought… Imagine if the development of the floppy disc had continued beyond the 3.5 inch 1.44 MB disc in the same way that spinning disc hard drives has exploded over the years to crazy capacities. This type of camera might still be practical for something like Instagram or similar!
Exactly! To be fair, it was kind of developed further by SyQuest and especially Iomega, the latter with ZIP discs...
Gordon, love these videos. A walk down memory lane.....
You're very welcome, have you seen them all?
@@DinoBytes No but I have enjoyed and responded to a few I have seen.
When I took that photo of you in the cafe, it took so long I thought it had switched off! Imagine having to wait that long for a digital photo now….I owned one of these but I must have a selective memory about waiting for the images to record. Strangely the exit data on the images I found don’t have the camera model number on them - perhaps something that wasn’t around at the time?
Yeah, mine didn't have EXIF info either, just the date and time, I'll look into when that started... PS - thanks for the photo BTW!
Hi and thank you so much for a really nice video about the first Mavica. Yes, I was one of those people who got one in 1997; I loved it, held onto it for at least ten years, then stupidly sold it! I now have a Mavica back again and love it once more; this time I am not letting go of it! I am going to try to get a few different models of it as well, but I am just grateful to have one once again. Cheers!
Happy memories!
Wonderfully thought out and executed review. Thank you!
I remember buying a Sony miniDV camcoder in 2002. One of the selling points of the model I chose was the presence of a slot for a Sony Magicgate memory stick and the ability to record stills on it at the incredible resolution of 1 megapixel! Good times.
Me too! I filmed my first videos for YT on a Mini DV camcorder that also had a memory stick slot in it - the mini kind...
Great video !! We had a Mavica at the office for “departmental use” back when .
Yes, it's always fun to playback some of those disks!
Great video! We actually still have a couple of these at work, they’re in a classroom display cabinet though so no idea if they’re functional
Get them out!
My company has a Nikon F90 with a Kodak DCS digital back in a display case. Whenever I am in that room, I take a moment to soak up the view.
@@jan-hendrikbussmann4644 very nice! I actually have a similar model on loan from Canon at the moment, but no means to charge it, argh!
Cool! Looks like film from the 40', 50's or something. I think I still have mine around here somewhere.
Try and get it working again!
We had one of these in 1997/1998. I remember using it in photo class of high school for a “different medium”, because we were shooting B&W film by default.
How did you find the experience versus film?
@@DinoBytes I remember thinking it was a joke and not a real photography tool. That said all our film photos were physical. We had no way to scan for uploading onto computer.
@@EDHBlvd exactly, if the goal was to get them into a computer, this was so quick and easy.
That was my first digital camera, and I held onto it for a few years after it was definitely obsolete simply because of the convenience of the floppy discs. Surely every computer would always have a floppy drive, right?
I know, right?!
My fancy, VR capable modern desktop is going to be getting a USB floppy drive installed shortly, since I just found a Mavica FD75, sure it stands no chance against my EOS Rebel T6 it doesn't matter, sometimes is more fun to work with something limited and weird rather than the modern standard
I worked for a company in the mid-late 90s that sold cameras and software to orthodontists and oral surgeons. We sold these specifically, then the Fuji DS-220 (640x480) with a macro attachment, later the Nikon Coolpix 900 (1.3MP). It was an amazing time seeing the industry change so quickly.
And they all looked completely different! Hope you enjoy my other videos!
Thanks Gordon. Mine's a functional MVC-FD83 with its original battery + charger, strap, lens cap, and assorted body stickers all faded to the point of illegibility. There's considerable rubbing down to bare plackiness (placking, not brassing :) around the shutter button. The camera's paid for itself many times over shooting listings for an estate agency.
Nice one! Yews, they were very popular with real-estate and other regularly updated listings.
Oh man, the gloriously garish jaggies! There’s something about low res, jaggy and interlaced images from the late 90s to the mid 00s. Lots of nostalgia right there.
I remember pouring over Sony’s PULSE magazine in the early-mid 00s absorbing their consumer electronic offerings. Among the products that caught my eye was Sony’s Mavica lineup, especially the MVC-CD400. A digital camera that can record onto CDs?! It blew my mind. 20 years later and I still want one.
I remember reviewing the CD Mavicas and hope to have one on this channel soon!
@@DinoBytes Please do! I was just searching for a review of Sony's CD Mavicas on YT and there are very little.
I bought one back in '99 when I was 12 years old. I still own it and am still using it now in 2024. It has a pretty impressive build; mine has never been repaired, so every mechanical part is still original, but I do regular cleaning maintenance.
What do you clean?
Awesome, I've still got a fully working FD87 and 20 floppy discs. Likewise I use an external floppy disc reader to get the images onto my laptop. Great fun, I still get mine out now and again 😁
Great to hear!
Back in 1998-2001 or so, this was the only digital camera I was aware of. Someone brought one of these to to my school back in the early 2000's.
Used one of these for taking images of the machinery in the Cadbury factory where I worked in the early nineties. It was a revelation at the time as we moved up from a Kodak that could store 6 images from memory.
I love the idea of a floppy disc camera in a chocolate factory!
These take me back to the time when I was a little kid and digital photography was just starting to build its ground. I remember my aunt gave us a Fujifilm point & shoot digital camera and it had a 2MP resolution (which I considered really high back then) with a 32 MB XD picture card.
I hope to do some early Fujifilms soon...
This is the review I have been waiting for! A trip down memory lane. I had the FD7! I also was drawn to the flexibility of using floppies. Other cameras of the time had cables to connect but that was before USB was a proper standard, so there were cumbersome drivers to install and other complications. The floppy disk was fab! I had the Memory Stick reader too. It was faster and higher capacity.
But the picture quality was rubbish and the camera was too big. Around 2000 I went back to film with a tiny APS camera.
I wish I still had my FD7, I gave it away a long time ago. Ah well, fun times!
You should try and pick one up for old time's sake! They are fun to use today!
Sony is a company with a rich history of trying things out and the floppy series cameras are a cool reminder of what creativity can create!
I like that the battery for that camera is so used that you can get a good one today!
Have a good weekend!
Thanks!
Thanks Gordon,interesting video about the Mavica,the earliest digital camera I have is a Ricoh RDC-300Z which uses a smart media card,it came free with a Tiny computer I bought many years ago.The camera still worked last time I checked a few months ago
Excellent! Richoh made some interesting cameras back in the day and I look forward to including some here!
My Dad had one of these back in the day and it even had a screw on zoom lens. So much nostalgia
Nice! Do you still have it?
I don't think so. Not been home in over 10 years@@DinoBytes
mine was the 7 version with the 10 times zoom only 9 images to a disc but i was using the highest quailty etc. would always count off the seconds to the next shot. also a slight delay in taking the shot so for me taking action shots you sort of had to predict where the shot was going to be. images were perfect for my website at the time though. pockets bulging with discs one with full ones and one with new ones. great camera.
I'm Brighton based and was working in San Fransisco when they first came out. I actually queued in line to get one. Computers were only VGA or XVGA anyway so the quality was fine, much better then I could get with a photo and my blank and white Logitech hand scanner. I upgraded it a year layer to an Olympus C-820 with XGA (1024x768) resolution and I remember I was blown away by the image quality. This was 1998 though, and the quality was in a different world than the Leica I use now.
Hope you're enjoying the Brighton shots in my reviews!
This was the first digital camera that I used! My dad had it for his online store. It take was a have changer.
Yes, it definitely powered a few online stores!
Awesome review and love the series! I have seen them in charity shops many times and just not picked one up, my bad.
Bet you won't find any now!
Takes me back to the days when AOL bought my “film”. (That’s the primary reason why I chose this particular camera for my first digital.) It was far from perfect - but it was good enough to convince me that digital was the future. Mine was passed off to a local school’s “gifted students” program once I’d replaced it.
fantastic videos! I also have a few Sony Mavica in my collection :) Greetings from Romania!
Nice! PS - I had a lovely visit to Romania last November!
Love your videos Gordon, it brings back memories of drooling over these hi-tech cameras back in the day. Yes, remember these but never bought one though because back then I thought the quality wasn't as good compared to film, well... not yet, and they were quite expensive. Talking about disk cameras I came across a camera made by Sharp and it records pictures on MD disks at the flea market. Not sure if this was marketed outside Japan though.
Yeah, I've heard of some MiniDisc cameras, I need to look into that...
I wish I would have that back on the 90s or even on the early 2000s that would be sick
It's even cooler now!
Nice review. Did you know there was an improved version, the FD51, having a few extra features including one that does not seem to be documented, the lens mount is threaded for filters and supplementary lens.It's an odd size though, 26mm. Tiffen produced a kit for this camera containing tele, wide angle and close up lens, all having 37mm threads and a 26mm to 37mm adaptor.
Yes I remember that model. Sony made lots of Mavicas, they were v popular!
Hi Gordon, yes I owned it and it was my very first digital camera. I had a commercial photo studio and each year I would do a shoot for a client who needed lots of shots of products that they might include in a catalog at a later date. I always shot film and after it was processed they did a slide show for their buyers to see which products would make the final cut for inclusion later in the catalog. I didn't charge my client a lot to do these preliminary pictures as I would later make more shooting the catalog for them. In 1997 they asked if I could take the pictures with this Sony camera that had just come out. We would shoot as their trade show was starting and then they could show their buyers the product in what was an early version of a PowerPoint program. I agreed and said if they bought me the camera I would not charge for taking the pictures for their presentation. I was so excited to have my first digital camera and still own it.
Thanks for your memories! I loved how these were used in so many pro environments. Possibly one of the most used cameras for this kind of thing thanks to the ease of accessing the images.
You seem like you’re having so much fun making these throw-backs!
NGL, the (bad bad) image quality of that thing made me physically uncomfortable, lol
Yes, they're really fun to do, but quite stressful as I generally ad-lib the whole thing...
I also have a Sony TRV-900 MiniDV Handycam which also included a cardbus adapter to connect either the included FDD or memory stick for photos.
Hang on, a Mini DV camcorder that could record stills to a floppy accessory? That's brilliant, not sure I ever saw that!
@@DinoBytes Yes the Sony TRV-900 has 3CCD and the card bus adapter is removable so you can swap the memory stick cardbus for the FDD. So you have the somehow hold the floppy drive while holding the camera to take stills :) I just today had to repack the battery pack for a Sony Vaio UX UMPC with new 18650 cells because unlike the mavica camera the UMPC used a special battery that I can not find online anymore but it now works great again :) The Vaio UX takes quite good pics for its age considering it's a windows 7 pc and the first ever pc to have an SSD drive 32GB. Really enjoying your videos by the way :)
@@Raptor50aus thanks!
I remember when I was in high school, they had a similar camera, but it was I think a MVC-FD87. They protected that camera like it was made of gold. I never got to use it, but I always thought it was pretty cool. Over the years I've somehow managed to get two cameras, MDC-FD5 and the MVC-FD87. I remember getting the FD87, a friend of mine's girlfriend left it in my 73 Datsun 620 Pickup. I offered it back to her a few times, but she didn't want it back. The FD5, I don't remember getting the camera. Anyways I charged both batteries, only one took charge. Both cameras powered on, but only the FD5 actually writes to floppy, other one has disk error. I'm a fan of retro things, its really cool that one of the two cameras I have actually works.
Glad you're using it!
Sold these cameras in college and used one for many projects. It was a marvelous piece of tech! So much better than Apple’s QuickTake. Great video thanks for sharing!
Thanks for watching! Hope you get a chance to watch a couple more!
i own FD81 and FD200 Arriving today so far i love it
Nice one!
@@DinoBytes but will hunt for FD5s but havent seen any on ebay lately
Great review as always! This is surely an interesting device. Also nice to hear your experience with it from your work. Anecdotes like this are the icing on the cake.
This adapter is also very interesting - I really wonder how big the capacity is it can read. I still got some memory sticks laying around, from my Sony R1 time 😎
Do you still have the R1? That was a lovely camera! As for the adapter I suspect it'll work with any card, but may only recognise the first, say, 64MB of it. If I ever get hold of one I'll tell you!
@@DinoBytes No, I sold it back then, when I was switching in whole to DSLR. As much as I liked it, the AF and continuous shooting speed were too slow for my needs.
Yes, this adapter would be very interesting! I wonder if it also works in a PC floppy drive 😁
@@UdoKrawallo I assume it would...
When my first grandchild was born, my son rushed in said dad give me your digital camera, and of course it was the Sony MAVICA FD5, about an hour or so later the photos were on my computer, and as my grandchild celebrated his 23rd birthday yesterday, I can see those same photo 3 computers later, and in the bright lights of the hospital, they look very good.
Excellent!
OMG my first digital camera. 1998 and I was working across Asia. Big, slow and poor quality photos but I loved it.
Glad you found my video about it!
I remember using one of these in high school. You could not even fit a modern cell phone picture on one of those floppy disks.
Nice one Gordon. I used to use one of these 20 years ago to take product photos at my work. Currently bidding on one to showcase on my channel 😆
Nice one! Which model are you going for? I wouldn't mind the CD1000 and CD500 as well...
@@DinoBytes I can’t tell exactly, ironically the picture is too low res to tell. It’s a local auction house so I might pop on Monday and check it out in person. It’s definitely a floppy disc model though.
Probably ruined a ton of floppy discs by playing with the gates and putting my fingers on the disc itself. Fun times. Fascinating stuff to me back in the day.
Totally understandable, we all did it! 5.25in floppies were even worse!
The pics taken now looks like it's taken 20 years ago ha ha...
That's what I like about it!
okay call me weird but i want one of these because i feel it would beautiful for taking nostalgic, and liminal space photos just because of the artifacts, low res, the colors, ect its honestly a beauty
It's a fun system to use
I have seen them in thrift stores I had a few with the floppies but couldn't take very many pictures on the floppy so I gave them to my nephew to practice on .Since then however I found a floppy that was later available as in your video that could add a memory stick or something like that .If I find another i might buy it just to have .I think I have most of the MVC mini disc cameras from my MVC 1000 to the last newest being I think 5 meg ,.I love using this vintage stuff it makes photography more fun .
They are fun to play with!
Great detailed review. 👍 Nice camera from the Jurassic period. 😊🦖🦕
My Camera has arrived DSC F-1 pretty cool and I just downloaded the instructional manual ,I thought it included any how I will read the book first and I have a older PC with windows XP to load the software disc ,Stay Tuned .Am happy so far .this camera is really cool if nothing else 👍👍👍
I have been looking for this camera for a while now and finally got my hands on a working 1. I only paid $9 and it have the memory duo slot!
Nice buy! Which model?
@@DinoBytes I got the fd 100
Used at work. Enjoyed it and would still as a flirt to old better times...floppy is so tactile.
It is the in my collection, fully functional. 🤩🤩🤩
Excellent!
I had no idea you could get a USB floppy disk reader. Great. Now I’m going to make another ridiculous purchase because of one of your videos! Question- did this thing write EXIF info?
Ooh good question, I've just checked and sadly no EXIF info apart from the date and time.
I used to be Lead 1hr Lab Tech at a Walgreens once upon a time and I had a customer who shot with one of these!
How did the prints look?
@@DinoBytes My recollection is of thinking they looked "awful" - then again my benchmark at the time was shooting high quality images with high quality prime lenses on 35mm, or my Yashica TLR, or my Busch Pressman 45D 4x5. Yet - Still wanting one!
High Gordon, I'm currently in process of collecting early Sony digital cameras. I already have several of there key models, like the DSC R1 and F828, the H1 and H2, the Mavica range recently caught my attention, and yes I'm looking at several models on my favourite buying site, as an aside, I thought the images you took looked very film like in appearance. As for the Mavica, not sure which model should be my first... many thanks.
I'll be making vintage videos about the 828 snd R1 soon! As for Mavica, I'd get the first if you're a collector, or one with a bigger zoom
@@DinoBytes Thanks Gordon, 👍
I don't really remember what was our family's first camera but from what I know, my mom used a Yashica rangefinder starting around the late 80's (which is still in working order to this day). She and my dad went with several cameras along the years with some even using MMC cards and the last point-and-shoot they bought was a Sony DSC-W320 (currently in my possession). Around 2015 they bought our first DSLR, a Canon 1200D. Upto that point, I mainly use my phone as my camera and when I first used the 1200D and shot raw, that was when I was hooked with the power that even a basic DSLR had. I used that camera for a long time until I accidentally lost it in 2019. In 2020, I was able to replace it with a Canon 50D which I still daily drive to this day. My country is still in lockdown but during the pre-COVID era, I would bring my camera to school every day and me and friends would just have fun shooting with it. It's amazing how even older DSLRs can still produce stunning results when used properly. I can't wait to go back out and shoot again.
I remember reviewing the 50D, it was an still is a strong camera. When I was studying, I had an old film SLR and loved taking candid photos of my friends. Quality isn't paramount there, it's capturing precious moments.
I have three of these in my collection, two FD75s and an FD100 or 200 (Can't remember which, the only difference was the megapixel count)
Absolutely love how goofy they are, I really need to get some batteries for them so I can take them out. Thankfully I have wall power supplies for them. All three came from a school at some point.
It must be said that ejecting a floppy on the later models was even more satisfying, moving the eject lever sideways and the sliding it down!
A really neat feature on the 100/200 was the screen, if you look along the top there's a weird translucent bar across that would actually take ambient light in to illuminate the display.
AH yes I remember those sceens! As for chargers, my second hand one didn't come with one BUT I was able to use the third party charger I use to charge the bigger batteries for my HDMI recorder - nice to have a standard fitting!
Whoa. A memory stick floppy adapter. Of all the things I didn't expect to learn existed today, this would have been in the top slot.
I didn't own one of them, but do remember selling them. Estate agents found them useful for the reasons you mentioned. The first digital I purchased was a Kodak DC25 which used CF cards. I bought a Sony DSC S70 was convinced digital was the way forward!
I bought an S70 too! I've made a video about it if you're interested...
I was so jealous of these cameras, feeling stuck shooting film!
I have one of these cameras at home... it will be perfect for art projects!
Hope it still works! Give it a go!
I have 5 Mavicas I love them I still use the MVC 1000 on a regular basis the best thing is that I have every mini cd saved since I purchased it new in the 90's I have since purchased most of the MVC's up to the 5 meg on the mini Cd ,the only thing that changed was that you must use a pc .Macintosh stopped any software with os-10 so I have a few pc's for that but they rugged and it without intending it i started a collection of them ,and the mini cd's get still be bought online .
Nice one, maximum respect for your collection and commitment!
Just got FD5 off eBay. A technical question please. Where the camera keeps time and date for each image file? After all most of Mavicas including this one don't put an exif header to images. Another files on a floppy are .411 - thumbnails used for Index viewing. You can delete them and still able to see .jpg images. The only idea I have is the camera's floppy drive records time and date for each image at floppy itself and then reads it back. Any other ideas?
Hmm, good point, I'm not sure but will try to find out
I see a review 24 years later - i subscribe
I have plenty of these!
My first digital camera was a Panasonic NV-DCF2 with a princely 0.35MP (I think). It gave grainy pictures with limited exposure control - but it was DIGITAL and probably no worse than some of the cheap Polaroids. Of course, printing and photo-manipulation software was also way behind what we enjoy now. I still have the camera somewhere in a box and this video just might inspire me to go and find it for some retro-pictures.
Nice one, I hope it still works!
Cheers mate, just came to see if you’d done this yet!
You’ve inspired me to leave it in the box it’s stored in ha ha
However, I may raid the box to see if the batteries fit an old A65 I have.
Shit at low light, but still damn good for sports on a sunny day.
Oh no! I insist you get it out and take some shots with it again!
@@DinoBytes Hmm… mavica I have to buy discs and a drive for and get crappy shots, or the beauty I just spent good-used-car money on…?
I may need to think abou- Nah. 😉
I used to be a pediatrician and I used a Polaroid to take pictures of all my newborn patients (always including their parents so I'd remember them if they called). After a stay on my bulletin board (a real, not digital one) they went into the baby's chart.
My Polaroid died, so I replaced it with one of these and printed out the images on an ink jet. Between the low resolution of the Sony and the primitive ink jet, the pictures weren't good but satisfactory.
My most vivid memory was taking the camera to a concert in which my about 10 yr old daughter was singing. I then took the camera home and emailed the pic†uses to my brother 3000 miles away. Both he and I were amazed at the ease and speed of sharing the pictures. It was a real eye opener. I realized what a game changer digital photography could be. I used the Sony camera in the office for several years, but bought myself a Canon G1 for my own use.
PS - have you seen my video about the G1?
@@DinoBytes Yes, that's how I found you. Great stuff. Thanks!
Found a sony Mavica FD75 for 2$ at a thrift store, eagerly ordered a new battery, a pack of freash floppies, and a USB floppy drive for my desktop.
It's a a seemingly absurd device to have hanging beside my EOS Rebel T6, yet I adore the retro hardware and eagerly await the confusion and questions is someone sees me using this thing, especially when that floppy drive starts accessing with those rather distinctive sounds
It's great when you swap discs in public!
Loving this series on the old cameras! I would have been happy with one of these Sony Mavica FD cameras but unfortunately I bought a Casio QV which had terrible battery life on AA batteries, slow serial transfer of the photos, and image quality about the same as the Sony. Maybe my Casio had a fault but it would chew through a set of alkaline batteries in about 15 minutes just by having it turned on! I watched the Sony review on a smartphone & the image quality looked pretty nice. Back in those days many people would have had 12 or 14 inch monitors so the small file sizes would have been o.k.
I'm actually after one of the first Casio QV models to make a video about it!
this camera reminds me of the old time, first digital cam for me :)
I hope it's happy memories!
Thanks to you I had to have the very first Sony digital The DSC F-1 I found one on E-bay I think the guy was happy to unload it and replied quickly to my offer .It has the camera and the software Cd and all the cables and the instructional manual .I can't wait to see it ,I'll keep you posted .One thing those optics are so high quality that my MVC 1000 still puts out great very clear high quality pictures and the later ones with 5 meg pixels and the Zeiss optics aside from being a little slower are still some of the best cameras .the DSC F-717 is also still one of the highest quality affordable camera .Its fun using vintage cameras especially the ones that were the most advanced and high quality of their day.And the great thing about using the MVC cameras is I have every cd since I bought the camera in 1998 or 1999 so I can always access all events and recopy pictures that had they been on a Sd card would now be long gone .
You'll love the DSC F1, it's amazing! I'm trying to collect ALL the F series models, but the asking prices sometimes are a little ambitious to say the least!
Images look great considering they're only 1/3 megapixel. My first digital camera was a Polaroid which had no LCD screen in the back, can't remember the exact model (PDC something, I guess).
Yes, I remember they did some digitals. And yeah, if you look at my Instagram I posted one of those portraits and it looks ok!
so I want to know if that scooter that always shows up in your pictures is your scooter or you just know where it is always parked ;)
good question! No, it's not mine, it's always parked outside a mod-clothing store to advertise it. You can see the shop in the background.
I never owned one, but I used them in school. Can’t remember the exact model but just found one on eBay to play with my kids.
Nice one, hope it works - and that you have a drive to read them!
Last time you can record 20 pics on a single floppy disk. Now i would need 20 floppy disk foor a single pic LOL
Weeeell, I did a test and if you turn the JPEG compression all the down to about 1 or 2 in photoshop, you can get some - horrible looking - but very small files!
@@DinoBytes LOL
The FD71 was the first digital camera I got to use on a regular basis back in 1999/2000. A work colleague had one and I used it regularly for staff photos and the like… resolution was rather limited (compared to flat bed scanning a 4x6” print) but with good light the quality wasn’t terrible. Floppies of course were massively cheaper than solid state media of the era, but ironically upgrading to the then new and floppy-less PowerMac G4 made accessing the photos kinda annoying 😂
It was amazing how many of us used these floppy cameras in a production environment!
I'm rather glad that my last SLR camera didn't kick the bucket until 2003, because it seems that the quality of the early digital photographs wasn't up to much, though I can see the development of such new tech must have been very exciting at the time, particularlry for those who could see where it was all going.
It did move pretty quickly. By 2000 we had 3MP and they were already looking pretty good...
great explanation, funny to see that today a $300 cellphone takes much better pictures then those expansive cameras. I became a photography enthusiast after digital photography started.
Still better colors than the latest iPhone, amazing.
That is a hard camera to love lol
Had the FD7 not too long after it was released. My first digital camera. Cost nearly a months wages, about NZ$1399 on special, saving a couple of hundred dollars. Was okay, but resolution was a letdown, and slow record speed was not ideal.
What did you use it for? Do you still have it?