Sony MVCFD73 Mavica Digital Camera
While the Mavica MVCFD73 is slightly larger than most newer digital cameras (it has to be to accommodate floppy disks), it's still relatively lightweight, if decidedly unsexy. It's best described as a large, flat square. The Sony Mavica MVCFD73 only has a top resolution of 640 x 480--fine for Web pages or e-mail attachments, but not really up to par with the rest of the digital-camera crowd if you want to print your pictures. It does have fun special effects, though, including black and white, sepia, negative, and solarized modes. The Sony Mavica MVCFD73 has one of the most impressive optical zooms we've seen on a digital camera--a whopping 10x, compared to the typical 2x or 3x on most others. It also gives you a great selection of programmed auto-exposure modes to help you take good pictures in a variety of situations. We found the fixed-focus ("panfocus") mode especially useful in preventing the constant refocusing that peeved us on other digital cameras. The Mavica line's greatest strength is that it uses floppy disks instead of memory cards to store photos. We found this convenient in many ways--the Sony Mavica MVCFD73 lets you copy images and whole disks onto a new floppy so you can give friends and clients their own copies of photos on the spot. You can even copy to a disk full of non-JPEG files, like text or other data. Floppies are cheap and easy to find, and you can just leave your old pictures on them and buy more disks if you want. However, you can't fit as many images on a floppy--30 or 40 is about normal, compared to up to 120 or more on a SmartMedia or CompactFlash card. We also really liked the simplicity of reading files from the Sony Mavica MVCFD73. For those with Windows 3.1 or later, you can read images and movies directly off the disk without having to install extra software (in most cases) or download the images through a serial or USB cable. It makes getting started much easier and allows you to download images to other computers without carting around a cable and software. The Sony Mavica MVCFD73 uses a rechargeable lithium battery pack, which is superior to the quick-draining AAs used by most other digital cameras. We especially like the remaining-battery-life indicator in the display window. |
While it's not the most advanced digital camera in terms of
picture quality, the wildly popular Sony Mavica MVCFD73 packs a lot of great features in
an extremely easy-to-use package. If you need a professional-quality digital camera, look
elsewhere, but if you want to take decent pictures with the convenience of floppy-disk
storage, long battery life, and the fun of a wide range of special effects, the Sony
Mavica MVCFD73 will win your heart.