I had a Sony Mavica MVC-FD91. I would take one photo per Floppy disk. It took very good photos and the lens with 14x Optical Zoom was incredible in its era.
Of all the old media formats to resurrect and we choose cassettes over the far superior minidisc? Vinyl i can understand but cassettes? The mind boggles.
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I know! They were small, compact, did not stretch or break, and did not wear down from playing or recording over again.
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In the late nineties I was working for the EPA in one of the Australian states. We were coding the internal staff directory and these cameras were the magic solution to getting photos of a couple thousand national park staff scattered out in the middle of nowhere. We basically mailed the camera and a pack of cheap disks out to a park. They would take shots of everyone and post the filled disks back to us in the capital and then send the camera on to the next park.
Cheap and fast and it seemed like magic at the time. Brilliant, robust and pretty much foolproof cameras.
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I did not like the Mavica. It was one of the reasons I did not want to transition from analog to digital photography.
We had several Mavicas at the college library where I worked, and I’d often borrow one for special events. Tragically I’m not sure any of the photos actually survived - I suppose some might be lying around on floppies in the bottom of a box somewhere, but generally they went onto websites that no longer exist. Still, being able to take a bunch of shots and slam the disk straight into a PC was incredible at the time, regardless of having to carry around a bunch of floppies. I remember one holiday in Wales we found ourselves trapped in some floodwater between two hills, and I was taking photos with a Mavica - I expect the images themselves were terrible, but handling that chunky, impractical beast has somehow helped preserve the memory far more effectively.
1280x960? More like 640x480, if you want to fit more than one photo on a floppy disc.
I had one of these and loved it. It was like magic. I used it to take pictures at my friend’s jazz club. We took some of the photos (again, 640x480) and blew them up to poster size, then applied a large halftone pattern to the final output to make them look retro and hide the low resolution. Loved the result.
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Here are some pictures I took in 1998 at the Artists’ Quarter jazz club in St. Paul, MN, using my Sony Mavica FD5 digital camera.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010308205654/http://www.mnjazz.com:80/aq/bobrockwell.html
I think the blue tint was added after taking them-- can’t remember but it looks like it to me.
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You think that’s weird?
I had a Nokia 9290 phone back in the day. When camera phones started showing up, the way Nokia handled it with the Communicator product line was to sell an external camera which transferred photos to the phone via IR.
These things were already bricks, and hard to fit in your pocket:
And then you have to lug this thing with?
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Then you have the 20x24 format POLAROID!! cameras still floating around and being used (while film supplies last, anyway):
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They were kind of meh; I had one back in '99-2002 ish working for a tier 1 ISP- It was a useful thing to lug around on sites to document screwups or rack layouts to build pretty pretty pictures in visio later on.
They were pretty rugged, at least- I never had any problems with it, and the few times I used the ‘fish eye’ lens attachment for it were amusing, at least until I lost the attachment on one of my many flights during those days.
I did like the SX-70 at the time. But I sold it before Polaroid went bankrupt (the first time around).
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Oh yes, the SX-70… I’ve still got one, and in use, too.
Although I have been ogling the Leica lately:
http://us.leica-camera.com/Photography/Leica-Sofort/Leica-Sofort?/switchlanguage/to/corposite_eng_us/154751
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I forgot I had one of those! I wonder what happened to it.
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