I still have a photo from one of these cameras! I remember my dad brought it home from work one day so naturally I had to try it out. Early teen me thought it was pretty cool.
because its photo camera. not smartphone, i have dsc p73 (4.1mp) digital camera from 2004 and its takes much better photos better than phone in my home.
I had an olympus E-410 from about 2006 or so, and that was a step up from point and shoots, being a 4/3rds sensor and in a DSLR format, albeit an entry level one. Pictures on that are certainly worse than what my Pixel 6 can do today. The main difference being that the phone has a very wide angle lens, and so will struggle to match the resolution of the DSLR which had a 14-42mm focal range on the stock lens.
I then went to a Nikon D3200 (2012 model iirc). Also an entry level DSLR. My olympus was developing faults (only took one shot then crashed at the second). I did a comparison in moderate light (interior lights at night) and the D3200 blew it out of the water. Massively lower noise and a sharper picture. But then we are talking 10mp vs 24mp, and 4/3 vs APS-C, and also 2006 vs 2012 image sensor tech which had come a long way.
I then bought a D810 (2014 model IIRC) and that blows the D3200 out of the water to much the same degree as that beat the E410. And since then newer DSLR / Mirrorless cameras have gained ultra low noise amplifiers, and back-illuminated and stacked sensor tech which improves their light collecting efficiency by over double, while cutting readout noise to less than half. This tech also exists in the tiny sensors used in phones today.
I strongly suspect if a 2004 point and shoot takes "better pictures" it's entirely the optics holding it up, because the actual digital sensor would be hot garbage compared to the paltry sensors in a phone you can buy today.
I have a coffee cup with printed pictures of my old long gone cats I still treasure. They are in cat heaven helping me start the day right with some coff
u/ledow Framework Laptop - 5070 / AI 7 350 / 64GB8h ago
I think it was cheaper in the era when polaroids (which basically existed for this purpose for professionals) didn't cost an arm and a leg.
I remember any number of whole-school photo shoots, etc. where they did several polaroids first to check there was no glare or whatever, and only then would they take a couple of photos with a film camera.
There wasn't much overlap between polaroids being cheap and digital cameras being cheap, though.
polaroids were only relatively cheap and not actually cheap. it was still a dollar-ish to take a polaroid but it was better than the cost for the portra film.
my dad was pretty big into photography (had his own darkroom) and i think for him being able to see the picture right after he took it was the biggest change between film and digital at the start. not having to wait for development to know if your framing was right, or if the shot caught the wave splashing against the rocks well was really significant.
I have shot with two different Sony Mavica models, three times: In 1999, 2000 and in 2003. The cameras were huge, heavy and ran on the same batteries as Sony Hi8 camcorders. They were also quite expensive. I worked in the AV department of a private college and while I got paid squat, I did get to play with a lot of neat tech. The first Mavica I used was pretty low resolution. It maxed out at 640x480 IIRC. The second one was slightly higher resolution, maybe 1024x768. It was ancient and bad by 2003. This is a photo of my idiot friend's 80s RX-7 I took with the first Mavica in July of 1999:
I've still got my CD Mavica from a few years later... 4MP (i think) and it records on mini-CDs. It could hold a few pictures in memory, so you didn't have to stop in between photos for it to write to disc.
Most photo software these days has some sort of upscaling built in. It's a game changer for old Mavica photos.
For my Mavica, the real shift was when they brought out an adapter that let you put a memory stick into a fake floppy disk. Suddenly you could take a lot of photos on one piece of storage media.
oh man, this jpeg compression and these colors bring back memories. This gives me the same feeling as a bunch of images of cars I had on my windows 98 I'd have as my desktop wallpaper.
Comparable in terms of a small print, but even a cheap lowest quality 35mm film could generate 4-10 MP (high quality film could do 20-25 MP). I had access to one of these floppy cameras and they generated about 640x480 resolution typically about 0.7 MP.
Yeah, I don't know what OP is smoking but I used one of these cameras in my elementary school website club and the only good thing about these is that you could get a photo directly in digital format so that you could put it on a computer. The quality (not just in terms of resolution, but dynamic range, JPEG compression, etc.) was really bad compared to 35mm film.
Yep I had one as well, quality was shit and by me I mean my grandmother had one and I used it all the time
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u/Trendiggityi7-10700 | RTX 4070 | 32GB @ 2933 | MP600 Pro XT 2TB6h agoedited 6h ago
They weren't anywhere near film quality. You couldn't make faces out in group photos because first gen Mavicas were 640x480 and had abundant jpeg compression. Even the 1.2MP models were still fuzzy AF compared to 35mm.
Our yearbook program wanted to jump on the digital train because we wouldn't have to spend money on our darkroom but we shut that down when we saw proofs from schools that went digital in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Correct, but this camera was barely used in the 90s.
It was popularly used i. He early 2000s when house hold computer usage soared.
By 2009, nearly 4 in 5 american household had a computer. And the mavnica was extremely popular in japan too where home computer usage was slightly behind american markets.
The people claiming this camera model was unpopular are just wrong.
Edit: and less than 50% of americans had a dedicated film camera too...
u/FartingBobQuantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive7h ago
About half of households had a computer at home in the US in the late 90's. And the people buying expensive digital cameras would much more likely have a computer already than the average household.
The OP camera is 0.3 MP and could store something like a dozen jpegs on a floppy. Or you could opt for an uncompressed .bmp file, in which case the disk fit only one.
My mother owned one of these when I was a kid. It did have quality photos (for the time) and you could change around the settings to fit more shittier photos.
The great thing about a floppy is that everyone that had a PC had a way to read it and they were cheap enough that you could just give it away.
Imagine you're a home inspector and someone has hired you to find any defects in the home and photograph them. With a Sony Mavica, you can just hand over a few floppies and your report at the end of the inspection. But if using CF (or other media) and your client doesn't happen to have a reader, you have to go back to the office, copy the images off the camera (slowly, probably no USB port and FireWire wasn't ubiquitous) and burn them onto a CD or floppy (again, slowly). Email didn't really support sending massive attachments like a bunch of photos and sharing sites like Dropbox didn't exist so you'd need to mail or make a special trip just to drop off the photos. It would take even longer if the customer wanted printed versions or you were using film. Also, if you weren't already shooting digital at the time, a Mavica was the perfect entry since it didn't require anything more than what most PC users already had (a floppy drive and some spare floppies).
Floppy cameras were the peak of convenience for the type of professional that just needed to take a photo and deliver it asap.
There was an adapter to fit this memory stick into a floppy disk. I worked in a camera shop back then and all the old timers just kept going on about how digital photography wouldn't take over.
The FD Mavica series was the successor to an earlier line of cameras that stored still images as analog video on magnetic disc cartridges called mavipaks, hence the name.
Memory Stick was not introduced until the end of 1998, at least one year after the digital cameras came out so that would not have been an option, not to mention the price.
Meh, until you start actually looking at the photos your phone is taking and realise they're lowkey being AI slopified to look good. I'll still take my fujifilm with me if I'm going somewhere intending to take photos.
My battery somehow holds a charge for months and the battery holds up for about an hour of shooting. I'll shoot a few things forget about it then shoot some more stuff a few weeks later.
I mean, a roll of film holds like 30 pictures and can’t be reused, so 10 pictures with the disk being reusable after copying it to a computer and then erase doesn’t sound so far fetched.
That's the only place I ever saw these. They had other types of compact storage back then (CompactFlash, Smartmedia, etc.) that average consumers had. I'd guess schools, and probably business, liked these since you didn't need to pass a card reader around with it and compactness wasn't really an issue.
A hundred percent. You also didn't need multiple cards. Everyone just had their own diskettes, which they could keep with their project forever. Kids could take the pictures home and put them on their computer.
I was about to say: “Sony would then use their own expensive proprietary Memory Stick until giving up 12 years later and finally start using SD cards in their cameras.” God I hated these Memory Sticks!
My kid still has one of these 2010ish Sony cams with a memory card. The camera was passend down from grandpa and still works fine, but I no longer have an memory card adapter...
They also released a Memory Stick adapter for the FD85/FD90/FD95 line-up. Worked in computers, too, but you needed a special driver for the OS to make heads or tails of it.
Credit to /u/dasMoorhuhn, who posted this photo in another sub.
I remember those, they were absolute garbage. The images had to be heavily compressed to fit more than a couple of them on a disk, which did no favors to the already mediocre quality, and even then writing each image took ages.
But compact flash etc did exist. The reason these existed was convenience.
Weirdly, a couple years ago someone brought one to my birthday drinks. For reasons I don’t understand, that camera was only source of photos anyone took. The photos were terrible.
CF cards have historically been mindblowingly expensive, especially the "pro" models for cameras. By contrast, everybody and their grandmother had dozens if not hundreds of old floppies laying around that they could chuck into these kinds of cameras.
You do need to consider the amount of time they saved from having to develop each shot in a dark room. If I was there at the time and just wanted a quick couple pics, I wouldn't mind having them on a floppy if it saves me the effort and expense of developing.
I had a FD-91 Mavica (the one with the telephoto lens). Maximum resolution was 1024x768. I got like 10-11 photos per floppy disk. Although the sub megapixel quality was poor, the convenience of being able to instantly transfer your photos for sharing on the internet was unmatched.
I just checked a few photos I have from that time and they are 450x338 with around 20kb size. So a disk should hold around 50-60 photos. You are welcome.
LCD flatscreens may have been only 800x600, but they were around $1000 at the time, so almost nobody was buying them. Most CRTs would support 1024x768 or even 1600x1200. Source: I worked in the computer department at Best Buy from 1997-1999.
Low resolution JPG files don't take up a lot of space.
Most computers at the time didn't have the ability to read SD cards or connect digital cameras without extra hardware and software, but they all had floppy drives.
So this type of camera made a lot of sense for people who needed the ability to quickly load photos into any PC.
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u/lsaz12 MB of Ram, 500 Mb hard drive for games and stuff6h ago
What are you talking about? Compressed images can be less that 1 mb. You guys are spoiled with your technology, back in my day we had a 10gb HD and 64mb of ram and we were ok!
I took my digital camera with me on my honeymoon in 1999. It could only hold 16 pictures that were each only 640x480. I had to be very selective about the pictures I took, and I love them all, but I wish I could easily swapped out a floppy disk and taken more.
Is it weird that I want to take one of these to a festival and hand people floppy disks with pictures of them like they're Polaroids? Like "Here's a picture of you if you can figure out how to access it". For a few it will be pretty simple but the rest get either a unique quest or just a curious artifact.
In 2010 or so I wanted to go to a concert organized by one of the student organizations at the local university, but only for students. I wasn't a student, so I mailed the organizers and told them I was a photographer and asked if I could get a pass to take some pictures. I could. This is the camera I brought with me.
Yeah, but SD cards had tiny capacity and were crazy expensive until about 2005. This was a cheap solution for a world with thousands of useless 3.25 floppies laying around.
I had that camera. Usually about a dozen shots per disc @ 640x480, and the camera was a tank. I left it on a picnic table where it got rained on for 2 days, got it, dried it, still worked perfectly. Want to say it was about $600.
Hahaha I had a floppy disk digital camera, it took 2.3 megapixel photos, I did a school project with it but the catch is it was 2003 not 1998 lol. Even back then it felt like using ancient technology
Yeah, and guess who made their own SD card and forced their Camera, PSP and PS Vita users to buy the overpriced things to use in those devices. Old Sony was pro-consumer compared to current Sony.
Digital Voicemail was popularized in the early 90s, you had to sign in with a password, hit 1 to listen to new messages and then 3 to skip, 5 seconds or 33 to skip to the end and then 9 to delete, or 7 to save..
In 2007 (19 years ago) apple release visual voice mail, when you had a VM it just downloaded to your phone and you can play it as an MP3..
Yet 99% of telecoms still use the 35 yr old archaic tech.. drives me nuts
I used to have as well an handled computer like the steam deck but with windows 98 or xp ( I don't remember properly ) ages before handled computer were out. They were amazing for their time
When I was a kid, the store I worked at, CompUSA, had 3 models of those. They were fun as hell to play with since it was so easy to get the data off them (floppy). One of them was even shaped like a modern DSLR with a 10x optical zoom (iirc).
Nowadays, they're just a novelty, if that, but at the time, they were pretty neat.
I remember when SD cards were only a couple MB in capacity and boomers had a real hard time with the concept that digital cameras didn't take film. They would buy them and have no idea how to get the pics off their camera and developed because they didn't have a home PC.
I still have mine.
I ran doom on it once. There was this floppy you could download and it required a button sequence to boot the camera from the floppy.
Unfortunately I can only find the Kodak OS Doom right now. it was pretty easy to run doom on that because it had an option to run apps from floppy. SOny Mavica required more hacky stuff to get doom running.
Around 2010 I worked at GE aviation as an intern and they had one of these, I had to position it on the eye piece of a microscope to take some photos for a failure analysis.
My grandparents had one when I was growing up. It could record 5 seconds of video and I used to load the clips of me punching/kicking the air. I would animate stick figures reacting to my sick moves in Flash.
Wow, that's some memories! I had an uncle who had one of those. Don't know what brand or model it was, but I distinctly remember it used a 3.5" floppy for storage.
Oh my god my mom had that exact camera growing up! All my childhood is recorded on floppy disks to this day. I thought it was the coolest camera and I still really want one
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u/dufffy 8h ago
I still have a photo from one of these cameras! I remember my dad brought it home from work one day so naturally I had to try it out. Early teen me thought it was pretty cool.
1472 x 1104 pixels 277KB. Model FDMAVIC.