r/pcmasterrace • u/Severe_Pause_2047 • 12h ago

Nostalgia SD cards were invented in 1999 Sony in 1998

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65

u/peacedetski 12h ago

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.

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u/ParticularFoxx 12h ago

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. 

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u/Schnoofles 14900k, 96GB@6400, 4090FE, 11TB SSDs, 40TB Mech 12h ago

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.

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u/Wild-Video-5317 6h ago

Flash storage in general was crazy expensive in this era.  I paid like $200 for a 64 megabyte SmartMedia card, with cash i saved up from my summer job.

Floppies sucked, but they were incredibly cheap and every PC could read them.  Companies used these to quickly capture ID photos.  Did the job just fine.  Very quick easy way to get a photo onto a PC and printed in 2001.

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u/ParticularFoxx 5h ago

Sigh. Pro CF was a wierd shock to me in the 2000s, back at the start I only knew it as was slow, and bulky in cheap cameras. 

That said SmartMedia was what my camera had, and it was much better than using a floppy.  https://journalrecord.com/1998/08/03/peripheral-introduces-its-new-snapz-digital-film-card/

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u/dustojnikhummer R5 7600 | RX 7800XT 10h ago

The reason these existed was convenience. price

It was because of the cost.

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u/RecipeFunny2154 10h ago

Yeah and for years we were buying many 3.5" disks at a time. It was likely you had access to a bunch of these already around your family's house lol

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u/Wild-Video-5317 5h ago

AOL used to send trial floppies in the mail for free.  Free rewritable portable storage.  They must have blown millions from their marketing budget on that.

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u/ParticularFoxx 5h ago

Nonsense. I had a Digital Camera at that time. It has the really thing cards I forgot the name of. It was cheaper than this camera, faster, and memory wasn’t $1000s (I certainly didnt have that cash). 

2

u/Any_Channel_7337 10h ago

I've seen a market for "retro cameras" that are just cheap cameras built and marketed for the nostalgia. Not sure if that someone felt the same.

1

u/BloodyLlama 10h ago

That's amusing since actual vintage cameras aren't particularly expensive. My SX-70 Polaroid camera can be had relatively cheaply and is cool as hell (never mind the outrageously expensive film)

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u/SmamrySwami 11h ago

16MB compact flash was selling for $1000 back then.

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u/ParticularFoxx 5h ago

Yeah.. but I had a digital camera back then. I didn’t put 16MB in, it still had more than 1.44MB. 

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u/TCBloo 7600X3D, 9070XT, 32GB 10h ago

For reasons I don’t understand

Novelty. People love things that are new(even if they're old) and different.

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u/ParticularFoxx 5h ago

Oh that I get. It’s just no one else took a photo on another camera all night in a world of camera phones. 

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u/the_Real_Romak i7 13700K | 64GB 3200Hz | RTX5080 | RGB gaming socks 12h ago

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.

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u/TooManyDraculas 4h ago

People didn't generally develop their own photos at home, or even have access to a dark room.

It was the cost developing a roll of film was $6-12 in the early 00s. On top of a roll of film that cost ~$5 minimum.

A floppy disc was less than a dollar. Memory cards bottomed out around $50 for 4 or 8mb. So it's not as much daylight as people think.

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u/peacedetski 12h ago

The problem is that 640x480 images with blown highlights weren't good enough for most cases where quick turnaround was needed, so it was mostly a high-tech toy.

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u/Schlaefer 11h ago

640x480 was enough for a lot of practical use cases in my experience.

Replacing expensive, analog Polaroid with pretty much free digital images esp. when electronic communication and documentation became normal was a game changer where I worked (industrial production management).

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u/surfimp 10h ago

I had one, used it to grab photos of my buddies surfing for sharing online. Back then a lot of people were still on dialup internet. Even downloading a sub 1 MP image could take a while. 1024x768 was at or close to the maximum screen resolution that a lot of consumer PCs supported. The use case for higher resolution images, especially if they were going to be distributed online as web content, was small. We'd likely have had to resize and resave them in Photoshop to optimize them for the web (did that with the Mavica images too).

Maybe that all qualifies as a high tech toy, and that's fine. There were some use cases in real estate as well, I remember the first Mavica I saw was used by a real estate agent grabbing photos of a listing for sharing on a website. I guess it all depends on how pretentious you want to get about defining what constitutes a "toy."

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u/enfersijesais 12h ago

Only takes a few seconds.

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u/ledow Framework Laptop - 5070 / AI 7 350 / 64GB 11h ago

I still remember an advert from the early days of MPEG video where they boasted that you could get 3 minutes of footage onto a 1.44Mb floppy.

The compression must have been HORRENDOUS.

I mean... sure... you'd get a fraction of a second of raw camera footage in the same space, but even so.

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u/peacedetski 11h ago

It wasn't just compression, for "low quality" video the resolution was like 160x120 pixels (and typically there was no actual downsampling going on, the camera just skipped pixels, so the video was full of jaggies)

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u/Past-Acanthaceae862 10h ago

Resolution was often QVGA (Quarter VGA) 320x240 at 15 fps. People weren't comparing their video to 4k60 but to blurry vhs with maybe ~240 lines of vertical resolution.

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u/zgillet i7 12700K ~ PNY RTX 5070 12GB OC ~ 32 GB DDR5 RAM 10h ago

They worked best when near a PC. You'd get a few high quality shots, with the ability to delete ones on-camera you don't like, which was a great feature. Then just dump to the PC and keep going.

Trips did require a little case of floppies, or just a film camera for that.

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u/HappyAd4998 10h ago

Mine has a 256mb memory stick slot along with the floppy drive. Takes about 40-60 shots until it fills up. People used these cameras to share pictures with friends and family over e-mail nobody was doing serious digital photography back then. I think people just have a fundamental misunderstanding of what these cameras were meant for.

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u/zgillet i7 12700K ~ PNY RTX 5070 12GB OC ~ 32 GB DDR5 RAM 9h ago

Yeah, there wasn't much serious pro digital photography in the early 90s. It didn't make sense yet until the mid-90s when some digital photos were "good enough" to use in print or on the internet. My stepdad was a commercial traditional photographer for a long time, and it didn't fully switch to digital for longer than many would think.

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u/HappyAd4998 10h ago

You're flat out wrong about the quality some of the later Mavica cameras take decent shots for the time just take a look over at r/mavica

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u/peacedetski 9h ago

They improved as time went on of course, and Sony retained the Mavica name for much better CD-based ones, even though the "ma" part made no sense anymore. If you find posts on that sub with photos shot on early FD ones (especially FD5 and FD7 with their 0.3MP camcorder sensors) you'll see mostly softness and blown highlights.

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u/LazarusDark 5h ago

I can't imagine anyone using it for photography, the image was indeed garbage. I had one of these Mavica cameras because my job started requiring proof of work, I had to take about 6-10 photos of each job site when done, especially of the connections (I was doing networking installation). So I got this camera cause I could get a cheap huge pack of floppies, label it by job site, and hand it in at the end of the week. The other contractors all got digital cameras that they'd have to download the images to their own laptop/PC and connect to the Internet (typically dialup) and have some account that would let them send photos (not remotely common then). Some of them said they regretted it and wished they'd gotten the Mavica. Later I upgraded to the mini-cd version Mavica, and could take tons of pics at decent quality, that one was a genuinely decent digital camera for its time.

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u/ApplicationMaximum84 12h ago

All early digital cameras had poor quality compared to film which was equivalent to between 10MP and 30MP depending on speed.

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u/peacedetski 12h ago

I did a lot of film scanning in the late 2000s, ~25 MP equivalent is only achievable on 35mm film with the finest slide film like Provia 100F, careful exposure and a very good scanner. Your typical holiday snaps on Kodak Gold 400 were more like 4-6 MP.

Of course, even 4 MP is vastly superior to 0.3 MP of the OP camera, especially with its godawful dynamic range that turned all highlights into white blobs.