Critic: Mavica is a marvelous digital camera

Web posted December 22, 1998

By Larry Blasko
Associated Press

Consumer-level digital cameras are fun, but using them for serious tasks can sometimes be a hassle.

Most of them must be connected to a PC to have their images uploaded and printed or manipulated by a graphics program. And that takes much longer than it does to change film in a conventional camera.

Real estate agents, insurance adjusters and others whose jobs require taking pictures ought to check out Sony's MVC-FD81 Digital Mavica camera. It uses ordinary PC-formatted 3.5-inch floppy disks, has a three-power zoom lens and built-in microphone, and will even do a full minute of MPEG video and audio.

Its talent is reflected in its retail price of $899 -- about $100 less on sale.

Depending upon what you're shooting, file sizes at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels can run to 130,000 bytes, meaning you could fit about 10 pictures on a floppy disk. The pictures are in JPEG format. The CCD (charge-coupled device) that captures the picture has 800,000 pixels.

A nighttime shot of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree and skating rink in New York, taken from the third floor of a nearby building, produced a 133,000-byte file and a spectacular image of the tree's thousands of lights glowing above the skaters and sightseers. The camera did a good job in the low-light situation, and working Adobe PhotoDeluxe from the floppy was much easier than uploading the image.

The camera has a 2.5-inch color LCD viewfinder that allows you to frame and play back your shots, so you can judge immediately whether a follow-up shot is needed.

It is intelligently designed. The disk-eject procedure requires pushing two buttons, which makes accidents less likely. The lens cap is attached to the camera body by a lanyard so it doesn't become misplaced. The right-hand grip rests snugly in the hand, the shutter button is properly located, and the zoom control falls neatly under the right thumb.

Cycle time between pictures is about three seconds -- not good for a sequence of action shots, but fine for almost everything else. And the convenience of the floppy disks means that you can keep shooting until the battery runs down -- about two hours with Sony's InfoLithium battery, which has a microchip that figures how much power remains.

An intelligent flash is built in, along with a mouse button for navigating the on-screen menus, a self-timer and threads for attaching a camera stand.

Two weeks of taking pictures of various subjects produced no glitches and several shots that will live on as screensavers. The camera formats and copies disks, which can also be done on any IBM-compatible PC.

The microphone allows you to record comments about the images, making it handy for caption writing. And a built-in speaker lets you replay the audio. The package includes a sturdy neck strap and a battery charger.

Sony products are widely available.