Mavica Camera

mavica digital camera

By Ryanita

The Mavica was a brand of camera introduced in the early 80’s by electronics giant Sony. It was the first electronic camera ever released though it was not a digital. These cameras used a 2 floppy disc to store images on and are considered the pioneer technology for today’s digital cameras.

The Mavica Digital Camera was highly popular as one of the first digital cameras simply because you could transfer photos from the camera to your computer on a floppy disk. When digital cameras first came out, the question was always how one gets the digital photos from the camera to the computer. There was a lot of “compatibility” problems.

As time progressed, Mavica began to offer different storage options such as memory sticks and finally in 2000 they offered a device that used an 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW. A few years later the Mavica line of cameras was discontinued but that does not mean you will not be able to find a few of them still floating around.

As late as 2006 customers were still purchasing the Mavica camera and accessories, even though at this point they are considered ancient.

Mavica- FD-200

Mavica cd1000

The Mavica FD200 isn’t what you’d call a small camera. It’s bigger than almost any other camera out there, especially considering it only has a 3X zoom lens. Why is it so large? The answer, of course, is that floppy drive that makes the camera appealing to so many. Thought it is bulky, it’s remarkably easy to hold, even with one hand. There’s plenty of room for the other hand, as well.

The camera is made of what I’d call “high grade plastic”. The official dimensions are 5.5 x 4.0 x 3.0 inches (W x H x D), and the camera weighs a healthy 645 grams (with battery and floppy disk inserted). Let’s start our tour of the MVC-FD200 now

Features

• 2.5 inch color display
• PC or MAC compatible2 mega pixels
• 3x optical/ 2x digital zoom
• USB connection
• Memory stick or floppy disk (not included)
• Lithium ion battery- rechargeable

Pros

One unique feature of this Mavica camera is the lithium ion battery; it is actually an info battery. What this means is it displays on screen the amount of battery life you have left in minutes, not the standard set of green bars that really tell you nothing about how long you have left to shoot.

Since the floppy discs the Mavica camera was initially created to use are practically non-existent now, it is good that the camera has the ability to store images on a memory stick. To retrieve your photos you simply connect the camera to you computer via the USB cord that comes with it. It is safe to say with the advancement in technology it probably will not stack up to the current 8-10 mega pixels offered by most digital cameras.

Look and Feel

If you have one and need accessories for it, they are readily available on Amazon and similar sites, however if you are in the market for a new camera it would be a pass for the Mavica

The FD200 has a relatively slow F3.8 lens, with a focal range of 6.4 – 19.2 mm. That’s equivalent to 41 – 123 mm. The lens is threaded for 37 mm attachments, and as I mentioned, both lenses and filters are available. The lens on the FD200 never comes out of the body.

Above that sticker is the flash, which has a working range of 0.5 – 2.0 m. In real world usage, the flash didn’t do a very good job, as you’ll see later in the review. There is no support for an external flash on this camera.

Here’s the back of the FD200 now. If you’re wondering what happened to the optical viewfinder, well, there isn’t one. You have to rely on the LCD for everything, which consumes the batteries that much quicker.

That said, the 2.5″ LCD is beautiful — it’s very large, bright, and fluid. There’s a window at the top of it, which can let light through if you shut off the backlight (see switch just below the screen). Using natural light for the LCD only works outdoors with direct light.

There are two switches directly below the LCD. The one one on the left is the aforementioned LCD backlight switch. The next one is for changing between Playback, Still, and Movie mode.

The four buttons below that are for:

• Flash
• Focus (Macro, 0.5, 1.0, 3.0, 7.0 m, infinity)
• Program AE (Twilight mode, Twilight plus mode, landscape mode, panfocus mode, spot metering)
• Display – turns info on the LCD on/off

A quick note about those Program AE modes. Panfocus mode will quickly change the focus from a close subject to a distant one — this is great for people-pictures in front of landscapes. I don’t know why spot metering is here, but this makes the camera judge the exposure using a small area (a spot) that you determine.

On the far right of the photo you can see the release for the floppy drive, the Memory Stick slot, and down at the bottom, the USB port. I’ll take a closer look at the storage options a bit later in the review.

The Mavica solved that problem by simply storing the images on a floppy disk which everyone liked. You would simply remove the floppy disk from the camera and insert it into the floppy disk drive of your computer. Today, more and more computers doesn’t even have floppy disk drives. The Mavica hay-day wasn’t all that long ago and is a good example of how quickly the digital camera and computer products have developed in just a few years.

May be you wanna read about My Other Guide at :

• Nikon N75
• Nikon DSLR
• Sigma Camera Lenses
• Pentax Lens
• Nikon N90s
• Samsung Digital Camera
• Camera Printer
• Compact Binoculars