Sony Mavica: Photos on floppy disks!
 

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. :rolleyes:

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:
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...mavicafd91.jpg
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:
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...testpic004.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ca/kips007.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...a/plane001.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...19/vendor8.jpg
(more photos from the same convention taken with the FD91 can be found here)
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...on301_fd91.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ca/poly800.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada.../spacetime.jpg

More soon!
-Adam

I'm shocked Sony actually used a standard storage medium! Those pictures are excellent for 1998, imo.

First 5 years of my digital camera life 2000 - 2005 was with an FD-91. Still have it. Don't think I have a battery that will work it though. Anyone with a hankerin' for one let me know!

Couple of pics from the races at TMS back in 2005. The wide one is two I put together.

There's one of the basic ones available on Columbus OH craigslist right now...

Seen one in a flea market, but didn't bought it. It was only the camera.
But I'm glad to see that some one bought one :)
Off-topic: what are those Pyramids?

There where some pro cameras back then that made better digital image, but the price was above the reach of ordinary consumer, even in U.S.A. You could put some money for house buying in stad of buying a camera.

I've seen some mavicas pass through the local Goodwill. But I know it would be a forgotten knick knack in a month. The FedEx Kinko's in Lakeland FL had one they used for IIRC passport photos a good 12 years ago.

I dug out my FL-91 today and shot a few pix. I forgot how good it was for the time.

Sony made earlier use of the Mavica name for an instructional device, which apparently was not marketed.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...62cf64_w_d.jpg

jr

Sony also had one that recorded on 3" CD-RW as I recall.

Given that Sony invented the 3.5" floppy disk in the first place, they probably saw it as justified. ;) As for the quality, it's definitely lacking in low-light situations as evidenced in this photo, but does a pretty good job overall.

I've bought four of them so far, all at flea markets and thrift stores. One of them doesn't work (drive issues), but the other three work splendidly for what they are.
As for the 'pyramid' photo, those are two Time Pyramids flanking an Alien Clock. One of the Time Pyramids doesn't keep good time, but the array sure looks neat, I think. Just a few of the many clocks in my collection..... :screwy:

Yeah, the Mavica line was very popular with insurance companies, realtors, and other businesses. I believe the last two models were in production for at least a couple of years after the end of the format due to that fact.

Those photos look pretty good! My first 'digital capture' device around 2002 was a Panasonic VHS camcorder tethered to a Snappy Video Snapshot device, later replaced a few years later by a Kodak 'EasyShare' camera which I found at a flea market. I remember hearing much about the Mavica line, but didn't come across one for sale until last year.

With regards to batteries, I've had fairly good luck with the original Sony 'InfoLithium' packs, but there are several companies selling reproductions like this which work fairly well. Some of the offerings like this also include a battery charger, which comes in handy if the original has gone missing, which seems to be fairly common with Mavicas for some reason. :dunno:

Yep, they're still out there, as are the disks. And even the basic models can be kinda fun to mess with, since they included a button to apply 'picture effects' to the photos being taken. More on that later.

Very nice! :yes: I've been getting quite a bit of use from these Mavicas as of late. Seems much more convenient to transfer from floppies directly into the computer than to use an SD card and have to deal with the associated photo library program. Not quite sure why that is. :scratch2:

Interesting! I'm guessing that those 'Mavicards' are predecessors of their 2" "Mavipak" disks, also known as the "Video Floppy" format used with the original 1981 Mavica prototype, and later models like this one. Unlike the Mavica models from the late '90s, the earliest models were not digital, but rather were actually 'still video cameras', recording single frames of analog video onto the video floppies in concentric rings. I'm guessing the "Mavicard" model was an attempt at an early magnetic video disk using similar ideas. Any idea what size those 'cards' were?

Correct. Of course, that would be rather stretching the meaning of "Mavica", given that it originally(?) stood for MAgnetic VIdeo CAmera, but whatever floats their boat... :rolleyes:
-Adam

Dind't realized that Mavica it's an acronym.
@ Dave_A : That railway agency is still in operation?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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. :dunno:

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

Telecolor, Railway Express Agency in its final form ran from 1918 to 1975 and faded away as rail in the US faded away. More on Wikipedia. My first job in television was to make a weekly run to REA in 1970 to pick up a weeks worth of 2" tapes of some guy named Phil Donahue. A week later I would take them back to be sent on to another station and pick up a new weeks worth. The station looked like it was from 1890.

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!

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

Am I wrong, but there where also video cameras using MiniDisc?
Anyway, for whom presented interes this early digital cameras, since the image was not so good - even a cheap film compact camera could offer a good image.

I've read the article. Now I'm sad :tears:

I'll have to open my FD90 to see what it has inside it, and if the existing drive can be fixed. What you say about finding another unit may be true, but I'd rather not gut a working Mavica for parts if I can absolutely help it.

Yikes! :yikes: I'll definitely have to open it up at some point for inspection. Right now, it's sitting on The Pile™ waiting for me to find a new use for it.

There are a couple of models of "MD Discam" listed on this page, though I'm not sure if any of them made it to the US market, or how well they sold if they did. Sony was known for trying all sorts of weird videocam ideas, like the infamous Ruvi..........

And yes, I think we're all aware of the inferiority of early digital cameras vs. film, but if you wanted to get an image of something onto a computer for some reason, you didn't have much choice unless you felt like scanning photos or negatives, which had its own issues. The Mavicas made this quite easy, given that removable media was far from typical in digital cameras of that era, and direct connection methods were very slow and tedious in the pre-USB 2.0 era.
-Adam

Oh, still image on a tape. What could possibly go wrong? Just a stupid joke, sorry. But I wonder how they did recorded still image on a tape?
I knew that I've seen a page with M.D. cameras a few days ago, but didn't rember the adress of that page.
True the stuff with the connector. Paralel ports where slow and installing one on the camera would add size and weight. Well, the MiniDisc one had R.S.-232C port, because in the case of M.D.'s you needed a specail reader and probably not all where eager to spent money o an M.D. data reader.

Could be the same drive, or could be completely different or almost the same except a different connector or mounting hole somewhere, no telling. If you can find a service manual for the '90 then the part number for the drive should be there.

According to this video, 'stills' taken on the Ruvi simply recorded five seconds worth of a video frame (with its associated audio) onto the internal tape cartridge, which could hold 350 of them (or 30 minutes of video). Not quite sure what they were thinking with the whole Ruvi concept, but that's Sony for you.......... :rolleyes:

My first working stand-alone digital camera, a Kodak DC3200, used a RS-232 connection by way of a funky cable (1/8" TRS plug on one end, DB-9 connector on the other) which I 'borrowed' from a broken Polaroid-branded camera I'd found earlier. Since none of my photo-capable computers were equipped with an old-style serial connector, I had to use it in conjunction with a serial-to-USB adapter cable. Somehow, this allowed for file transfer using the proprietary Kodak EasyShare software, though it was extremely slow going, and if I tried to transfer too many photos at a time, the program would crash. :rant: Given that my 256MB CompactFlash card (smallest I could get at the time) held several hundred of its ~1MP photos, I didn't transfer all of the photos I took with the DC3200 until I got a HP printer/scanner which had a built-in CF reader.

I downloaded the service manual, and indeed, the FD90 uses a different drive mechanism (part number 1-772-563-11), so II dunno that it'd work. Might at least be able to use it as spare parts for the FD91, if worse comes to worse.

Anyway, with Comet Neowise said to be in the skies, I figured I'd attempt to take some photos of it down at the local beach during sunset using the FD91. I took some photos of what I thought was the comet, but I'm pretty sure it was just a disembodied portion of the nearby contrails. :sigh: In any case, it took some pretty nice photos of the clouds, plus some wider shots of the sky, water and a large house across the lake. Here are the photos:
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ach/comet1.jpg
(alternate views here and here)

http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ch/clouds1.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ch/clouds2.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...ch/clouds3.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...each/lake1.jpg
http://www.electronixandmore.com/ada...each/lake2.jpg

I found one for sale on a Romanian advertising site. But I'm not sure that I'm going to spent the money onto it. :)

Wow nice photos guys. Thanks for sharing.
The photos have such a nice early internet / early digital camera feel to them.
I still have to get ahold of a Mavica.
I've been looking for one local but still haven't found one yet.
The floppy disk storage would be ideal for me as I'm still using MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 a lot on my 486 computers.

Oldest digital camera I've got in my collection is a Sony cybershot from 2003. I got it in the box with the battery, memory card, all the cables and adapter for 10 bucks
Solid heavy little camera.
Looks like this one.
https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/a.../dscp7big.jpeg