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

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!

Imagine that!"

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.

*nice little beep sound plays*

And once it's powered on you

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

that later. Anyway taking photos takes about 6 seconds to save an image to disk,

at least on the original slower speed disk drive models, and for the most part

it seems to be quite reliable as long as you keep the drives clean. If you don't

or if the disks themselves are of the cheaper variety you'll probably see the

dreaded and rather unhelpful "DISK ERROR" message. ugh. When you do get a successful

shot though, retrieving the photos could not be easier, at least for the time

period. Just put the disk in a floppy drive and bam: you've got JPEGs!

No software needed, in fact the Mavica manual recommended just using Internet

Explorer. Although Sony originally included

ArcSoft PhotoStudio in the package as well. Well, I don't know about you but I'm

ready to take a look at some photos taken with each of these cameras! I'm

just going to show you the same scene here on the highest possible settings

for each camera, which in the case of the first one, the FD5 here, is 640x480 in

frame mode and fine detail. And really it's not that bad, the colors are pretty

good compared to some of the other cameras that I've looked at

from the mid-1990s. Although its fixed lens is a bit zoomed in, the field

of view is not very high. And it's notable when you compare it directly to

this shot from the FD75 when I was standing in the exact same location.

And as you might expect you get even better colors with the FD75 as well. It is

still 640x480, but even though it is the same resolution the overall result

is much more cleaner and vibrant. Then we get to the FD87 and this just has a

much better sensor all around. You get a greater dynamic range for everything, the

colors are still pretty darn good, it's a little bit brighter, and of course the

resolution is higher: you get 1280x960. And it also includes a timestamp in the

bottom right by default, I did not know that was there until I got the pictures

onto my computer. But I think it's fun to see the march of progress through the

lenses of the different FD Mavicas like this. And of course for an even greater

march of progress: compared it to the camera on my Galaxy Note 8 phone, which

is to be expected but yeah. You can really see how the colors and everything

should look in this particular scene. And then if we go back to, say, the FD75 you

can see that it really isn't terribly far off in terms of the color

reproduction for a digital camera from the time period. And the 75 also has

another mode that it can shoot in which is bitmap instead of saving in

compressed JPEG files. It's kind of hard to see the difference just like this, so

let's zoom in here. This is the JPEG under the 75, you get that classic JPEG

compression. And then here is the bitmap. These are both at the same 640x480

resolution so it's still not great, but it is a little bit better. Of course the

downside here is that you can only save *ONE* bitmap per floppy disk. However, what

makes this model even more attractive in my opinion is the 10x optical zoom.

So check this out: this is just JPEG 640x480 still but zoomed in 10 times with

that nice lens on the front. I mean it's pretty awesome

and quite sharp. I'm impressed, especially compared to the three times

optical zoom of the later FD87. Again, I'm just not as big of a fan of the

color that it picks up here. Maybe it's just this particular lighting but the

tiger looks more yellow than it should, in reality it's more of a golden orange.

On the plus side the 87 is just way speedier to use since it has a 4-speed

floppy drive: four times faster than the original FD5 and twice that of the

FD75. So you got a trade-off of different features going on for these

different models and I really like that. Makes it fun to collect them. And another

thing that makes it fun is the FD87 has these different filters, such as black

and white mode, the classic sepia toned mode, a negative color mode, and the most

confusing one to me is this one: solarize mode. I'm not sure what this effect is

supposed to be doing, it just sort of washes everything out and lowers the

color depth. Personally if I had to pick just one of these cameras to take out

and take pictures with it would be the FD5, the very earliest one. And it is

the one that I ended up using the most simply because it is so simple! The

further away that it is from a modern digital camera, even like the FD87, the

better. Because I like taking photos of environments and objects that would be

era appropriate for the camera itself: electronics, vehicles, buildings. And with

something like the FD87 I just don't get that because it just feels like a

crappier modern digital camera. Whereas the FD5, or even the FD75 to a degree,

that is trying *so hard* to make believable photographs! And across the

board I am just impressed with the way that the sensor picks up color. Granted,

it is very sensitive to the type of lighting that you have. It can be hard to

get different exposure settings correct or the flash, especially in indoor

settings. Taking a selfie with the flash is not recommended. But just under some

evening lighting it's not bad at all. In fact, I was also impressed with the

lower light situations of these cameras. I haven't even showed it on certain

other ones that I've made videos about because it really just couldn't do

anything with lower light. But the FD5 on up did pretty well with lower light

situations. And there's something about the artifacts that you get around

certain types of light that makes it fascinating to take photos with in my

opinion. And with how easy it is to look at what you've taken and then go back

and delete it from the floppy disk if you don't like it, then that's just awesome

and gives me more freedom to experiment with exposures and such. And here's

another thing that I really like about the FD5 and that is its built-in macro

lens. That little switch on the front lets you get really really close to

certain objects and get a nice clear photo. It can be kind of

hard to actually see if the photo you're getting is really clear or not on that

tiny little blurry LCD, but when you get it right it looks pretty good for a

digital camera from this time period.

Another fascinating feature --

ha, "feature."

-- is that frame and field mode option that you can shoot with that I was talking

about earlier in the video. You can really see how it works more akin to a