Sometimes when you’ve got some time to spare you hit the web, more especially eBay, and look for some random “vintage” tech. This story is one of them. A story of when SONY started its path into digital camera with the Mavica range.
After watching the below review of the CD Mavica on youTube from This Does Not Compute channel. I did what any other geek would do and see if there were any available on eBay. There was some & I won one for, what I thought, a good price.
After that purchase I then had a look at the rest of the SONY Mavica range & discovered the predecessor of the CD Mavica. That was the Mavica FD range. You may wonder why it was called it the FD range. Well, the CD Mavica saved the images to an 8 cm CD. The Mavica FD stored images in a mind blowing 1024×768 at 0.9 of a megapixel on a 3.5 inch, 1.44Mb, floppy disk! Just remember to bring a pocket full of disks as you can only store about 10 to a disk! It can also store video – in 5 second clips at a maximum size of 320×240.
Using the camera is straightforward. It’s a classic “Point & click” camera. It does look strange to modern eyes as some things are in the wrong place. The position of the lens makes it look more like a video camera of the era as well as having a large, 2.5 inch, screen to view your composition.
Ergonomically on the other hand it’s dreadful. This is mainly down to the storage media. No micro-SD cards on this one but a good old fashioned floppy disk! It also feels heavier than it looks & it does look heavy even if it’s actually only 650 grams!
The quality is as amazing as you would expect. A touch compressed even at its highest resolution but for a camera that saves to floppy it is a marvel as you can see in the below image.
All of this amazing technology came at a price. This camera would have cost you $899 at the time [I can’t find a UK price] a major price jump compared to a 35mm film camera of the era.
The main question I have asked myself is would I have owned one at the time. Possibly but there were better cameras available. On the other hand it is a SONY & I do have a soft spot for the manufacturer.
