Sony MVCFD88 Mavica Digital Camera
One drawback to the Sony Mavica MVCFD88 is that it's larger and more awkward to hold than most new digital cameras (it has to be to accommodate floppy disks). It shines in Sony's Mavica series, however, with one of the highest resolutions--at 1280 x 960--enabling Sony to finally approaches the rest of the top players in the digital-camera market. This Sony Mavica digital camera 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, annoying refocusing on digital cameras that lack focus-lock. The manual-focus ring was also a bonus. The Sony Mavica MVCFD88 also gives you four fun special effects. The MPEG-1 movie feature is great as well, although your movies won't be longer than one minute due to the limited storage capacity of floppies. The short movie clips are ready to be posted to the Web. The Sony Mavica MVCFD88 also lets you record audio clips with your still photos, another bonus. 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 MVCFD88 lets you copy images and whole disks onto a new floppy, allowing you to give friends and clients their own copies of photos on the spot. You can even copy 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 if you want. However, storage space with floppies is limited--16 images is about normal for this camera, compared with up to 40 or more images on a SmartMedia or CompactFlash card. We also really liked the simplicity of reading files from this Sony Mavica. 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. This makes it much easier to get started and allows you to download images to other computers without toting around a cable and software. The Sony Mavica MVCFD88 uses a rechargeable lithium battery pack, which we found superior to the quick-draining AAs used by most digital cameras. We especially liked the remaining-battery-life indicator in the display window. |
This Sony Mavica
digital camera packs a lot of great consumer features
in an easy-to-use package and finally catches up with other cameras in terms of
resolution. Along with the nifty ability to record short movies, this somewhat bulky
camera offers the convenience of floppy-disk storage, long battery life, and a wide range
of fun special effects.