abam wrote:
wait, wait. i'm fairly young, but - you'd actually stick a floppy disk into the mavica?
Yup! Hence the size. Seems odd, I agree, but given the cost and availability of flash memory at the time, I guess it was the only viable way to go. It had some really good functions for its time though, like manual focusing, video(!) and the option to turn the lcd backlight off in order to save your battery.
I knew a guy that bought that same Sony bought the 3 year warranty and now has the same Nikon rig as yours. Love those BB warrantys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
abam wrote:
wait, wait. i'm fairly young, but - you'd actually stick a floppy disk into the mavica?
Yes. They had low-res sensors with 640 or 800 pixel outputs IIRC, so the jpegs were small. It actually worked well for what it was. Since everyone had floppies and computers could read them, there was minimal additional cost. As you can imagine IQ was not so great. Later on there were digital cameras with mini-CD (8cm) writers. They were a bit of a problem as the disk had to be finalized or the images were lost. I recall they were marketed toward law enforcement too for a while.
First Digital camera Sony Mavica (circa 1997) to present day Nikon D3x studio camera riding a Nikkor 600 f/4 VRII with a 2x III. Upgrades listed below...
Storage: ~20 images on 1.4mb floppy to as many as 20,000 images on a 16GB CF card.
Reach: 42mm to 1,200mm (1,800mm in crop)
File Size: ~20kb per file to as much as 20mb (~1000x larger) on CF.
Cost: Around $200 at the time. Present cost of this Nikon setup new is around $20,000.
who am I kidding.
What that thing is massive!
