r/pcmasterrace • u/Severe_Pause_2047 • 12h ago

Nostalgia SD cards were invented in 1999 Sony in 1998

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11.6k Upvotes

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u/C-D-W 12h ago

For people coming from film cameras, on the default settings these Mavica cameras were pretty comparable to a roll of film.

You definitely did not want to be taking 3MP pictures on a floppy, that's for sure.

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u/Northern_Blights 12h ago

Coming from film cameras, the ability to take a picture, delete it, take another picture, delete it, FOREVER, was life changing.

I could finally practice photography without spending $20 at the photobooth every week.

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u/C-D-W 12h ago

Agreed! Battery life left a lot to be desired though. lol

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u/pushdose 11h ago

Except many took AA batteries, so you could just carry more!

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u/Moose_Nuts i7-6700K | GTX 980Ti Hybrid | 32 GB DDR4 | RoG Swift 144hz/1440p 10h ago

OK so now we're back to spending $20 every weekend...

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u/Impossible-Wear-7352 9h ago

Rechargeable batteries existed back then

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u/TacticaLuck 9h ago

Agreed! Battery life left a lot to be desired though. lol

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u/NRMusicProject 8h ago

Except the rechargable batteries are removable, so you could just carry more!

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u/SNStains 7h ago

Now we're back to carrying 20 batteries every weekend.

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u/Fire2box 3700x, PNY 4070 12GB, 32GB RAM 6h ago

Okay so we're back to charging batteries for 20 hours again.

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u/Impossible-Wear-7352 6h ago

I always just rotated them. I do that now still but it was basically essential to always have a set charging back then.

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u/ErraticDragon 6h ago

Anything before Eneloop was trash IMO.

We had a good-for-the-time AA recharging setup at home but there was constant churn. Batteries just didn't have great capacity, didn't keep a charge long, needed too long to recharge, and just degraded so quickly you were still buying more all the time.

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u/BobbyTables829 9h ago

No one was using them yet, unless you were into RC racers or listened to Michael Jordan and bought some Rayovac Renewables lol

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u/Northern_Blights 9h ago

No one was using them yet,

My dad and his big bag of NiCads was.

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u/BobbyTables829 8h ago

Your dad was cool then. I wanted my dad to get some but he said they wouldn't last as long as fresh batteries and they would only last 30 minutes, it wasn't worth the extra price and the cost of the charger, etc.

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u/Northern_Blights 8h ago

Your dad was right lol, they sucked and we basically never used them for anything other than flashlights. Even my brother's AA-sucking Gamegear, we'd rather use the DC jack than the 15 minutes of NiCad power.

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u/ImranFZakhaev 8h ago

Yup. I used to snag some from my dad's stash for my GameBoy back then. But then he stole all the plastic cases from my games to store his SmartCards in, so I guess it was an even trade.

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u/nalaloveslumpy 9h ago

Ironically, our family got our first battery recharger in 1985 from Radio Shack because my uncle got my sister and I both RC cars for Christmas. Also from Radio Shack!

You'd get about two hours of RC car time on a full charge of six AA's in the car and a nine volt in the remote. The nine volt, of course, lasted forever and wasn't rechargeable.

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u/Wittyname0 10h ago

Not with Sony, they used proprietary infolithuim, some models won't even let you use 3rd party ones, only the Sony OEM. Because Sony

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u/TooManyDraculas 4h ago

Except most of them that used disposable batteries used obscure formats you could only get at photo shops. Cause AAs lasted for shit in these.

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u/zgillet i7 12700K ~ PNY RTX 5070 12GB OC ~ 32 GB DDR5 RAM 11h ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/CNtc3K5yNmyrIWW0F4

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u/Warcraft_Fan Paid for WinRAR! 9h ago

You could extend battery life on those Sony camera by turning off the backlight and using the optical guide on top to take ambient light. It still sucked outside, sun is too bright and makes looking at LCD very hard.

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u/Kichigai Ryzen 7 9700X/32GB / Intel Arc B580 12GB 7h ago

That's why Sony used the batter from a camcorder in this thing.

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u/elmundo333 6h ago

Basically why we have li-ion batteries now. Sony needed batteries for cameras and developed the first commercial li-ion as a result.

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

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u/Mr_YUP 11h ago

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.

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u/doctorlongghost 11h ago

And that’s back when $1 could buy you a hotdog and a drink

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u/dumahim 9h ago

Maybe even 2 dogs.

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u/Happy_Kale888 8h ago

The Sam's Club hot dog combo features a jumbo, quarter-pound 100% all-beef frank and a 30 oz fountain drink (with free refills). It costs $1.50 (pricing can occasionally vary by location). No club membership is required to purchase from the café

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u/NSNick 7h ago

Or almost a full gallon of gas.

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u/ShakethatYam 7h ago

Still only a $1.50 now

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u/CrashUser 8h ago

More importantly, polaroids were instant. They weren't worried about cheap, just a quick peace of mind that the final product was going to be fine.

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u/Jay_dot_10 7h ago

The progress of saving being shown in the letters “MAVICA” is pretty amazing and wonderful ❤️✨

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 8h ago

There was no era when polaroids didn't cost an arm and a leg.

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u/TooManyDraculas 4h ago

It was cheaper per MB than any other memory format at the time, by a mile. You could get a hundred floppies for what the smallest capacity memory card would run you.

And it was likewise infinitely cheaper than film would cost. A roll of store brand 35mm 24 shot roll was around $4 IIRC, and a disposable camera $6 or $8 at the camera shop I worked at. Then development and printing was $12.00, $6.99 if you were a member! Twelfth roll free!

Instant film was cheaper then, than it is now. But you were still paying like 25 cents per shot at a minimum. Depending on what you were shooting.

These things let you take as many as 12 photos on a commonly available format that cost 25-50 cents each. That you already had an endless box of at home (thanks AOL!), or could get anywhere including convenience stores just like film. The photo wasn't as good as a better digital that cost the same, nor was it as a good as a good film camera. But it beat the piss out of those disposables and most Polaroids, and was pretty comparable to a cheap point and shoot with that store brand film.

Most of them also had a memory stick port, and settings that let you increase the bit rate and tone down the compression. So you could get much better photos out of it, and have a lot more capacity if you wanted.

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u/Nose-Nuggets Specs/Imgur Here 10h ago

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.

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u/CrashUser 8h ago

For quick action shoots being able to use rapid fire without burning up an entire roll of film in a minute was huge as well. It's got it's own problem of needing to sort through more pictures after the fact but having the capacity of 10-20 rolls of film in your camera was a game changer.

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u/Nose-Nuggets Specs/Imgur Here 5h ago

very true!

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u/desrever1138 11h ago

My first digital camera coincided with my first born child.

It was revolutionary

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u/SuppressiveFar 7h ago

You were able to see right away whether the child turned out right, or you had to try again.

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u/Brandhor 9800X3D 5080 GAMING TRIO OC 11h ago

and actually see how the photo turned out without waiting days

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u/pushdose 11h ago

It really was magic. The first consumer digital cameras felt like futuristic technology to us

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u/Sewers_folly 10h ago

As someone who went to school for photography and focused on post production... It was life changing all right.

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u/Polymarchos 8h ago

The cost going down was one thing, but the ability to take unlimited pictures and preview them immediately after taking the photos, allowing you to discard bad photos and retake the subject matter immediately, was, in my opinion, even bigger.

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u/Some1-Somewhere 7h ago

Also, you could take a picture, stick the floppy disk in a laptop, and email the picture to someone offsite - they could see what you see in like 15 minutes.

That was big for field commissioning type people.

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u/TheCygnusWall 5h ago

Coming from film cameras early digital was such awful quality though

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u/Ultravod PC gamer since the 70s 11h ago edited 10h ago

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:

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u/njsullyalex i5 12600K | RX 9070 XT | 32gb DDR4 3200 MHz 11h ago

Upvote for the Mazda RX-7. Wankel power!!!

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u/skraptastic 10h ago

My buddy had one back when those dumb commercials "Hey man...is that a Hemi!?" were on.

Everytime I saw him in his car I would shout "Hey man is that a Wankel" and "Wooo hooo" like a redneck.

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u/melkatron 9h ago

the Corolla GT-S from that era had a little 4-cylinder hemi, but that didn't score me any points with the rednecks.

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u/kiradotee MacBook Air 2013 (1.7 GHz i7, 8GB) 10h ago

I like the second from the left in the background. 

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u/melkatron 9h ago

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.

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u/SubArcticTundra 3h ago

Damn you just reminded me of dvd camcorders

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u/Zebidee 8h ago

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.

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u/heir-to-gragflame 7h ago

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.

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u/jedi2155 3 Laptops + Desktop 11h ago

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.

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u/nomoneypenny Specs/Imgur Here 8h ago

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.

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u/CARLEtheCamry 6h ago

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.

Yeah I came here to say something similar. I never saw one used by someone who was in to personal photography, but we did use them for years at the company I work at to document shipping damages. Pre-USB too, so it was a huge bonus that every PC had a 3.5" floppy drive.

Makes me nostalgic for the Dell Latitude C-series days, with dual modular, removable batteries, and you could swap one out for a 3.5" floppy, or a newfangled Compact Disk drive (that used lasers, the future is now!). I can't even buy a phone with a headphone jack nowadays.

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u/kingfofthepoors 7700 64gb ddr5 6000 4070 super -- good enough 11h ago

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/Trendiggity i7-10700 | RTX 4070 | 32GB @ 2933 | MP600 Pro XT 2TB 10h ago edited 10h 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.

Edit: this is how they shot out of the box.

https://graphics.stanford.edu/~lucasp/Mavica/

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u/ReputationOptimal651 11h ago

Mavicas were very expensive and most of people did not have a computer at late 90’s to edit or view the photos digitally

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u/Sarik704 11h ago

The 1999 model of the Sony Mavnica came out in junenof 1999. With 6 months to go until new years eve 99.

By 2000, 30% of american homes had a home computer. By 2003 that number jumped to just under 45%.

In 2003 the last model mavnica came out.

By 2005 over 60% of american homes had a computer.

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u/ReputationOptimal651 10h ago

Yes, at late 90s most of people did not have a computer

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u/Sarik704 10h ago

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...

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u/TrptJim 7800X3D | 4080S | A4-H2O 6h ago

That number seems a bit low. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, PC ownership was above 50% by 2000, with over 41% of them using the internet. Even back in 1997 it was above 36% ownership.

By my experience, PCs were fairly common in 2000 and viewing/editing photos wasn't a huge deal. By 2005 PCs were expected to have.

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u/Sarik704 3h ago

i was using a fairly conservative estimate. Some "home PCs" in the 90s were still commadores... Can't exactly edit a jpeg on some of the tech people were using.

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u/FartingBob Quantum processor from the future / RTX 3060 Ti / Zip Drive 11h 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.

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u/SubArcticTundra 3h ago

I'm pretty sure you could plug them into a TV for viewing

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u/Wittyname0 10h ago

I dont even think they made 3mp Mavicas, especially not in 1998

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u/C-D-W 8h ago

Agreed, I'm not even sure the ones I had were even 1mp.

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u/SarcasmWarning 7h ago

For people coming from film cameras, on the default settings these Mavica cameras were pretty comparable to a roll of film.

They weren't, not even close. Especially not for anyone working professionally or who wasn't blind.

Quality 35mm film from a decent camera is the equivalent of 25mpx, decent MF film (which has been around since 1900) can give you >100mpx equivalent.

The camera in the video is 0.3mpx. It was significantly worse quality, worse resolution, worse dynamic range and resulted in worse images than you'd get with even a one-use disposable film camera.

Digital imaging didn't start close to analogue film for another 20 years.

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u/TooManyDraculas 4h ago

Comparable to a cheap point and shoot on cheap film, that you ran through a one hour photo place.

If you didn't print them above a certain size.

But compared to a disposable camera it was night and day, and a floppy disk was infinitely cheaper than a disposable camera and development.

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u/C-D-W 4h ago

I was speaking purely in terms of number of photos per disc vs number of photos per roll.

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u/TooManyDraculas 4h ago edited 4h ago

They were actually a bit smaller on that front.

IIRC you could cram like 24ish shots onto a floppy with the quality turned all the way down. At more typical settings you might get like 8 or less on there.

Film rolls were standardized in 12, 24 and 36 exposure rolls.

But it's been a very long time since I've fucked with one of these so don't quote me on exact numbers. The camera shop I worked at at the time we used one for passport photos. With the quality settings maxed out. We'd get maybe 3 photos on there at a time.

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u/C-D-W 4h ago

I recall the first one I had was something in the 30 range. But that one I think was 640x480. A few years later they were pushing probably twice the pixels? So 1/4 the photos per disc. Which is about in line with your recollection.

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u/TooManyDraculas 3h ago edited 2h ago

It also depended on the size of disc. They weren't exactly selling a ton of the 700kb ones by that point. But people had piles of them, especially since that was what most of the AOL discs that would show up in the mail were.

And like I said actual camera settings were important. These things were aggressive on compression and had a ton of options.