Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/13/revisiting-the-mavica-sonys.html
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What a fantastic historical oddity; like finding a wax-cylinder walkman.
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Inevitably, hipsters will get into using these things.
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There was also the Mavica MVC-CD200-500s that burned images directly onto a CD, which naturally created some pretty funky-looking cameras.
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I coveted one of these so much. Could never afford one, I still think they are cool.
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The very first digital picture I took was on a Mavica!
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I used one of these for taking pictures for a web page back in the day. The floppies were actually a pretty slick move on Sonys part. Everybody had these laying around free from AOL and many others. There was also a CD-R version IIRC it took about a half hour to initialize the CD-R. Since the web was low rez back then these cameras were quite useful.
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My first digital camera was one of the earlier Mavicas, and could only get 640x480 - but it had a 10x optical zoom, and the picture quality was consistently great, for that resolution.
Fond memories…
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giving me memories of my Sony Mini-Disc data drive…
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Oh man, my brother and I were into MiniDiscs — what a great media format!
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I have a friend who still uses her Mavica to sell items on eBay. It has held up amazingly well.
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The one we had at my office would eat batteries if you didn’t use rechargeable ones. I think we would only get 10-20 pictures on standard AAs.
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I have an old CD-500, that burns the image directly to a rewritable miniature CD, that I actually still use sometimes at work, although it gives me a little trouble formatting sometimes and will only work with a Sony brand CD. The images are passable for what I’m doing with it, and shooting video is much easier than with my Nikon. It’s like having a giant phone that doesn’t connect to the internet, make calls, or get texts, but has a tripod socket.
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If memory serves, the legacy of these lived on in some of Sony’s early ‘memory stick’ based cameras(or maybe it was just the dual floppy/memory stick ones, memory does not entirely serve): the firmware would balk at individual files that were too large to fit on a floppy, even if shooting to a larger medium.
They obviously got that sorted out reasonably quickly; but it was a slightly awkward transition.
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Ah, the Ghost of Internet Past…
My first digital camera was this:
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I’ve still got one of these in storage, with complete accessories:
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37843/Canon-ion-RC-260/
http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Canon_RC-260
(If anyone is interested…)
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I had a mini disc recorder/player too - still have a pile of them with music on them that I have not touched since the player died.
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It would have been polite to have given LGR a credit in your text rather than just precis-ing his work.
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He does a whole lot of really great work.
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I had one of these. Took hundreds of photos of my 1999 honeymoon in Italy. Drove my wife crazy but she loves that I have all these images, still, from that trip. They still just fine, a bit Impressionistic, but often perfectly fine.
Here’s Venice, 18 years ago, seen from a Mavica.
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