Sony Mavica: Photos on floppy disks!

[AdamAnt316]

Originally Posted by Telecolor 3007

Dind't realized that Mavica it's an acronym.

Yeah, Sony loves those, as well as portmanteaus. For example, 'Trinitron' refers to them combining a trinity of electron guns into one.

Originally Posted by Ed in Tx

Pic quality was pretty good for .9MP!
I've added a few more from TMS in 2005. The guy in the light blue T-shirt is me about 40 lbs heavier and 15 years younger(!) geezzz...

The bag on my shoulder was for carrying the camera, batteries and extra floppy discs.

I was referring more to the sensor's performance in low-light and indoor conditions. It's obviously very capable in daylight, as your (and my) photos have proven.

How many disks (and batteries) were you hauling in that camera bag? When I took my FD91 to Northeast ComicCon, I just used the blue carrying case shown above, with six floppy discs (five in the case, one in the camera) and the reproduction battery I mentioned earlier. This was enough to yield 40 photos at the highest quality settings. It appears that the photos you took were on the 640x480 setting, so I'm guessing you took quite a few shots.

Originally Posted by Ed in Tx

btw I have a "new in the box" a 3.5" drive for that camera, Sony 1-759-679-11 just in case I needed one someday. It is available.

Good to know, thanks! Do you think that drive would work in the newer models? The model I have with an apparently bad drive is the FD90, which uses a 4X drive vs. the 2X unit from the FD91. Also, the FD90 was meant to be compatible with the Memory Stick Floppy Adapter, though I'm guessing that was mostly via software.

Originally Posted by Ed in Tx

Another "btw"... The Sony FD91 also took great macro closeups. I see "SPEC-4" in your list. I own two SPEC-4s, consecutive serial numbers. One of them blew up back in 2011. I've attached a couple of pics taken with the FD91 of weak cracked solder connections on the main amp board that fried. Before you turn on your SPEC-4 again I would highly recommend you go through it and re-solder everything! Then scrub off all the old brown nasty looking flux from the boards with a toothbrush and alcohol. Clean'em up good. All the boards in both of mine had cracked solder connections. The one that blew took out resistors, finals, drivers, other small transistors and diodes.

Again, good to know! The SPEC-4 isn't currently in service (running a McIntosh MC2505 in its place these days), but it never gave me any issues in the several years I had it in use. I'll have to open it up and give it a good look-through next time I plan to use it.

Originally Posted by jr_tech

Along similar lines, Sony also made a MiniDisc camera, as seen in this e-bay listing:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Sony-Hi-MD-...0f65d61780169b

I don’t think that they applied the Mavica name to this device, although the MD was a magnetic/optical media.

not affiliated,
jr

I read about that gizmo on Wikipedia, but hadn't actually seen a picture of it. Definitely looks more like a MiniDisc player which can take photos, rather than a a camera which uses MiniDiscs. I'm rather surprised that they never attempted a Mavica model based around MiniDiscs, especially considering that they (briefly?) tried pushing MiniDiscs as a data format, equipping some of their Vaio PCs with MD-Data drives. There apparently was a product called "MD Discam", but I have no idea if it did much on the market, or why they didn't use the Mavica name, given that they could've stretched the acronym to mean MAgneto-optical VIdeo CAmera.

Originally Posted by mr_rye89

I used the crap out of FD Mavicas in my mid-high school years ('01-'07) for my computer and Tech Lab 2000 classes. They were kinda old by then but I think the schools got 'em surplus from the county or something. I also have a couple of 5 megapixel CD-R Mavicas at work.

Yeah, I believe the majority of Mavica cameras continued in use long past when Sony stopped making new models. I know floppy disk drives were fairly commonplace in new computers well into the '00s, a decade or so after Apple began their death knell with the original iMac. Speaking of which, the USB floppy drive I use for transferring photos from my Mavicas to my Mac Mini was originally intended for use with iMacs and other colorful Apple computers, having a plastic panel attached to allow it to match the computer it's connected to to some degree.
-Adam

[Ed in Tx]

Originally Posted by AdamAnt316

Do you think that drive would work in the newer models?

Do not know. If the part numbers match up..

Problem is you can probably buy a used camera that works for what the shipping cost would be to send it to you!

The SPEC-4 isn't currently in service (running a McIntosh MC2505 in its place these days), but it never gave me any issues in the several years I had it in use. I'll have to open it up and give it a good look-through next time I plan to use it.

-Adam

Mine didn't give me any problems either for the first 30 years of use. Then one day upon power-On, *pop* smoke ... dead.