Sony Mavica: Photos on floppy disks!

[AdamAnt316]

Dave A's threads on old digital cameras have reminded me that, for the past year or so, I've been futzing around with Sony's Mavica line of digital cameras. For those who aren't familiar with them, the Mavicas used 3.5" floppy disks as their storage medium, which came in handy back when pretty much all computers were still equipped with floppy disk drives, since solid-state memory was still expensive at the time, and transferring photos from most early digital cameras to your computer using a (non-USB) serial cable was slow and tedious. The first Digital Mavica models, MVC-FD5 and FD7, were introduced in 1997; the last models, MVC-FD100 and FD200, were introduced in 2002 and, as a sign of the future of digital photography, were also equipped with MemoryStick slots.

Anyway, on with the cameras! I'll start off with the first Mavica model I found, which was also one of their best (spec-wise), the MVC-FD91 from 1998:

I'm pretty sure the lens setup was borrowed from their Handycam line of 8mm camcorders, as it sports both 14x optical zoom and "SteadyShot" vibration resistance. The sensor is capable of 1024x768 resolution, as crowed by one of the various colorful stickers stuck to the housing, and each floppy disk generally holds 6-7 photos at the highest quality settings. The image quality isn't that great, even by Mavica standards, but it's definitely a capable camera, and the old F330/F550 "InfoLithium" battery packs still manage to hold a decent charge 20+ years on. Here are some example photos:




(more photos from the same convention taken with the FD91 can be found here)




More soon!
-Adam