Vintage Tech Review: A Floppy Disk Camera (Sony Mavica)

"The meaning of life is to leave behind weird and confusing stuff at estate sales." Gotta love this guy. Lol

"Way back, WAY back, in the year 2000... " Wow. I really feel old. When I was your age we had to make our own pictures by crushing bugs, bark, and berries to make paint and smear it on the cave walls.

When I was in middle school I had a class that let anyone borrow a Sony Mavica for 2 days. It was amazing being able to take photos for the internet on a whim. I filled the floppy many dozens of times. A few years later I bought a 1.3mp adaptec "pen cam" that fit in my pocket. Technology moved fast in the 90s.

I had one of them back in the day, Picked it up because I lived at a very dangerous intersection and once a week I would be out taking photos of damaged cars, cleaning up glass / car parts, doing basic first aid, and passing around an early 900 MHz cordless phone. The really great thing was being able to provide people involved copies of the floppy full of images. Actually paid for itself as some people and a few insurance companies sent me a little $ for my efforts.

I used this as an official US Customs/CBP as a evidence camera, up till 2006/7 ish. The floppy made organization easy as all you had to do to see what is in the very sealed evidence bag/box/vehicle {add anything imaginable}

Why do I always smile watching your videos. Please never stop posting.

We used to have these available for checkout at the high school when I was starting my IT career back in 1999/2000. They were a lot of fun and surprisingly reliable.

Dude. This brings back tons of memories. I was born in 1996 and my dad had this. All my birth pictures as well as family pictures till 2003 were on this. We did have a film camera as well. But man. My dad still has about 500 floppy disks which we finally loaded on our P4 pc back in 2002. 512mb ram back then was considered God like.We still have this in storage. I'll probably search our pc box in this week to find it. Thanks for the great memory.

I had one of those in 2000 and I vividly remember it being able to hold 11 pictures. It doesn’t sound like much but just being able to see a picture right after taking it made all the difference at the time and it was amazing! Simple pleasures. Lol!

My parents were VERY proud to show off their Sony digital camera. LOL, this takes me back

I like older tech because you will always find cool and interesting stuff, I never seen one of those cameras before, but they sure look super interesting.

Two things. That translucent area above the display was to allow sunlight in to help see the display in bright daylight. This is something displays today still have a problem with. Second, the short video clips could be used to make motion Gif images.

We had one of these at Microdyne. It was used to take shots of the assembly processes. It was also used to take photos of damage of returned equipment.

Ah, I owned one of those in 1998. It was amazing that you could swap out storage and take all the 640x480 pictures to your hearts content. I made the only digital photos of winter festivals with that model. Edit: oops I had the earlier model.

The earlier Mavica MVC-FD71 was my first digital camera. Somebody at a thrift store had NO idea what it was and marked it $5 when it should have been closer to $100. Then again by 2004-2005 I guess these may have only been worth $5. Either way it took me many years before seeing another one for so cheap. I took mine into the woods and to my favorite railroad bridge. I used to have a train driver that would wave to me but no matter how hard I tried, I never saw him drive the train when I brought my camera. Still to this day I have never had a charger for any of my Mavicas... I just jam 9v into the battery and let it figure itself out. lol

I remember using that in school. It really brings me back.

Damn that's cool as hell, I heard about this kind of camera but never even saw an ad for one. Nice video.

Back in 2001, Microsoft released the TV Photo Viewer . It was floppy drive designed for use with televisions. They work great to display stills from this camera.

That's the perfect little piece of vintage Tech to let your kids or grandkids play with

I got to use one of these around 23 years ago. My computer lab teacher let my friend and I borrow it for an hour to take pictures of each other. It was half decent.