Welcome to another (long) blog entry about old electronics!
This time from the early days of digital photography. Last entry in this direction was about a CD based Mavica. Since then I took a lot of pictures with the CD camera and I’m surprised how good they actually are. Having only a limited resolution of 1600*1200 (≈2.1 megapixel) it surely can’t compete even with the cheapest cameras/phones nowadays… but it is surely usable and was a valid alternative to analog photography (albeit not on the same level as proper 35mm photographic film).The model I want to show you today is different. It is NOT suitable for everyday use and the picture quality is below any reasonable level. Interesting part is that it uses standard 3.5” floppy disks as storage medium opposed to CDs or – like common digital cameras – memory cards like SD. Sony released a lot of interesting cameras in the Mavica series. Give the German Wikipedia a try as well: In this rare instance it provides better information than the English version, notably the nice chart with technical details (no real German language knowledge required).
I had the chance to get a working MVC-FD91 – one of the better models (sadly not the best one, which is probably the MVC-FD97). What makes many of the cameras interesting is the huge amount of zoom. D*mn. It would have been nice to take pictures of the floppy Mavica with another floppy Mavica. That would be really in proper style. Having only one of these “fit for a museum” cameras, this is impossible. No, I'm not placing the camera in front of a mirror! Next best thing was using the newer CD camera. That is what I did:
Images of the MVC-FD91 taken with MVC-CD200:
Back to the zoom topic. The MVC-FD91 is in my possession for some weeks now, but it order to demonstrate the impressive zoom I had to drive away. Weather had been unsuitable for weeks. No way I’m risking water damage on a vintage device! Today I drove away on the Autobahn and took a few pictures on a parking space… and later leaving the Autobahn into the middle of nowhere for taking pictures of a wind generator.
Please have a look at the two series of pictures zooming in. That is some seriously good optical system! This thing is not a camera. It’s a f…ing telescope! Just held back by an outdated CCD and an even more outdated storage medium requiring an insane JPEG compression.
It makes me want to cry! This would be surely an awesome thing with a modern CCD and SD card.
Zoom Function of the MVC-FD91:
Floppy Disk Limits
Depending of lighting and scene complexity a picture on “high” quality with 1024*768 resolution is compressed to somewhere between 100KB and 300KB (rarely this big). The “Disk full” message appears after about 8 pictures in average.As you might (and should!) know 1440KB (2 sides * 80 tracks * 18 sectors * 512Bytes) is not the real capacity of the formally widespread 3.5” HD floppies. They can go higher. Reliability and compatibility goes down, but if you don’t push too hard you get away with “overformatting”. Still pretty reliable is DMF “Distribution Media Format” used by Microsoft for example for the Windows 95 floppy installation¹. With 21 sectors per track this increases the available memory to 1680KB. Depending on your drive more than 80 tracks are possible. 82 is a fairly safe value. Many drives can go to 85 tracks.
Despite the manual of my new old camera leaving no doubt about using only standard formatting – 1440KB – I tried DMF and others. Result: The camera accepts the formats, writes to floppy disk but stops as soon as the next picture is not guaranteed to keep the total size below 1440KB leaving any space gained by special formatting unused. Bummer! One or two pictures more would have been nice to have.
Some of the latest floppy Mavicas supported an active (with batteries!) adapter allowing Sony Memory Stick to be used instead of a floppy disk. This adapter makes the Memory Stick to be readable/writable with the camera floppy drive! Works on PC with any standard drive as well using the software that comes with the adapter. Good luck finding one. I'll keep trying…
Conclusion:
This was a very expensive toy for rich show-offs with zero practical value. It is a camcorder (those often had insanely good optics as well!) converted to a still camera using floppy disks instead of VHS tapes._________________
¹ What a load of floppy disks! And what a boring installation! Go ahead and prepare a set for Windows 98
