Name: 索尼數碼Mavica：1997年軟盤相機體驗記 (Sony Digital Mavica: 1997 Floppy Disk Camera Experience)
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Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And this thing right here is the Sony

Mavica MVC-FD5, released in 1997 at a suggested retail price of $599. This was

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not only the first of Sony's FD Mavica line of digital cameras but it was the

first digital camera to use 3.5" diskettes as its storage medium of choice.

Sony ad guy: "Take a look at the Sony Digital Mavica! High resolution and VGA

images on a full-featured digital camera, all of the convenience of a floppy disk!

LGR: Oh yes, no need for any bizarre formatting or disk types, all you

needed was a standard 1.44 megabyte floppy disk like you'd use with most any

PC of the time period. This was a big deal since most competing digital

cameras were using internal flash memory and often required serial cables and

proprietary software. So these cameras may have had an advantage in terms of

read/write times while taking photos, but retrieving said photos was objectively

slower and more cumbersome. And while removable flash media like CompactFlash

and SmartMedia cards were gaining traction, those were still more expensive

than floppy disks and also required adapters to plug them into your computer.

Heck, even Sony's first consumer digital camera, the DSC-F1, stored its images onto

non removable internal memory and cost a lot more as a result at $850. But three

and a half inch floppy disks, mm, they were positively ubiquitous! And combined

with the pricing of the cameras that continued to drop as the tech improved,

FD Mavicas accounted for up to 40% of the entire digital camera market in the

U.S. at their peak. Though it is worth noting that this was not the first time

Sony used disks in their cameras. This wasn't even the first Mavica camera! The

earliest prototypes appeared all the way back in 1981 and began hitting the

market in 1987, with the name Mavica representing these first two letters of

the words: Magnetic Video Camera. These early Mavicas used 2 inch Video Floppy

or VF disks, but despite that they were not digital cameras. Rather, these were

known as "still video cameras." This is a topic for another LGR video entirely but

the basic idea is that you've got an analog video camera that recorded a

moment of video and played it back repeatedly so as to provide a still

image to a video output device like a TV. But this changed in 1997 with the

release of the FD Mavica series, namely the MVC-FD5 and FD7.

Each of these were fully digital still cameras with a quarter-inch 640x480 CCD,

the biggest difference between the two introductory models here was that

the $599 FD5 had a fixed 4.8 millimeter lens and the $799 FD7 had a 4.2 - 42mm

lens providing a 10 times optical zoom. Of the original two models

I only have the FD5 here to show in this video, but over the years I've

stumbled across plenty of these things while thrifting. And two of those that I

want to show are the FD75 from 2001 and the FD87, also from 2001. I find these

models fascinating since, even though they come from the same year, the 75

feels notably older than the 87 in terms of capabilities. So it's amusing to

compare them side-by-side. While they do differ a bit here and there

what's common across all models of the FD Mavica line are their usage of

3.5 inch high-density floppy discs so no matter which one of the 18

or so models you choose from you can still use the same exact storage media.

Although Sony did attempt to bridge the gap between old and new storage tech

around the year 2000 with the Memory Stick/Floppy Disk Adapter. This allowed

you to use Sony Memory Sticks with certain later compatible Mavicas to

provide potentially hundreds of megabytes of storage using the same old

floppy disk mechanism. And amusingly required to CR-2016 batteries of its own

to pull off the job. Man, I love funky media adapters like this. And for the

most part you can also use these same rechargeable lithium ion batteries

across FD Mavicas, these being the InfoLithium NP-F300 and F500

series. Rather annoyingly though there are certain models like the FD75 that only

accept original Sony InfoLithium batteries, so modern third-party ones you

can find online today won't work without some modification. Seeing as most of the

original batteries have long since stopped holding a charge and can be

rather expensive when they do, this can be super annoying so look out for it!

Another commonality between these models is their inclusion of an illuminated

2.5 inch color TFT LCD screen on the back that acts as a viewfinder as

well as a way to manage camera settings and saved images. Several competing

cameras were doing this as well, but looking at a screen instead of through

an optical viewfinder was still a pretty fresh way of taking photographs in 1997.

But as much as these models have in common let's take a closer look at the

FD5, which I really appreciate for how straightforward it is. On the front of

the camera past the shutter release button and the flash you get a

4.8 millimeter fixed focal length lens with an aperture of 2.0, the

equivalent of a 47 millimeter lens on a 35 mil camera. And while the

focal length was fixed you have this macro mode switch which allowed you to

shift the focus much closer to photograph objects three to nine inches

away. And all your photos were captured with an ISO of 100 with a shutter speed

between 1/60th and 1/4000th of a second. And at a

0.31 megapixel 640x480 resolution, compressed in the JPEG file format at

one of two levels, which meant that you could store around 40 standard quality

images or 20 fine quality images on a single floppy disk. Around the left side

here you get the floppy disk mechanism itself which is pretty straightforward.

It's a lot like a laptop floppy disk drive of the time. On the top and on the

right there's nothing really of note. Along the bottom you have the battery

compartment and there's also another battery compartment on the bottom right

of the rear of the camera. This takes a CR-2025 button cell battery to save your

settings. There's also a nice little circular d-pad here that works

surprisingly well, a button for turning on and off the display, the flash, some

brightness up and down options for the LCD screen, a switch for switching between

playback and taking photos, and of course the on and off switch.

And you get a nice little sound when you do that.

have some on screen options and display notification thingies

which are navigated using that directional pad. So you can turn on and

off the timer, adjust the exposure value if you're not happy with what the camera

automatically does, and a menu for adjusting the clock, turning on and off the

beeping, switching the quality of the JPEG compression, and something called

"field / frame." And this demands a bit of a closer look.

Many of the imaging components inside the FD5 and the FD7 were shared with

Sony's own NTSC video cameras, capturing images by digitizing either a single

field or a full frame of the video feed that it was recording. Taking a picture

in field mode captures an interlaced video image and interpolates it, filling

in the missing lines to give you a 640x480 JPEG. And while taking a photo in

frame mode you're provided a full 640x480 JPEG image off the bat, produced by

combining two fields captured a split second apart with "unique" results. More on

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索尼數碼Mavica：1997年軟盤相機體驗記 (Sony Digital Mavica: 1997 Floppy Disk Camera Experience)

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