Thanks Jordan! Do you like my cheeky tour around Brighton, presenting talking points Chris and Jordan style? Actually I think this review comes acrosss 10 times better than many of my cameralabs ones. Maybe this is the way forward!
I started working as a graphic designer for Sony in Cologne in '96, this was the first camera we promoted there. A huge improvement over the QuickTake 100 I won at the Apple stand at an exhibition the previous year as far as image quality went, despite having the same resolution. What I remember most about this camera was the amazingly solid feel to it-seemed like it would serve you forever. Sadly a bit too early in the digital camera cycle for that. The idea of being able to flip the lens for selfies seemed vain at the time, who could have guessed how far things would go in that direction....
Ironically the Floppy Disk Mavicas are still fully useable thanks to USB Floppy drives and it's battery still being commonplace in many pieces of photography equipment
it's funny, after I made this video I re-reviewed a few more from a few years later and they weren't always as advanced as this one. I wish I'd given it more credit!! I'm going to do the first Mavica next, so I'll get to mention the F1 again in that one...
This makes me feel less bad about my a7siii only having 12 MP… (I shoot photos with it as well as video) Love this retro perspective! Keep this channel going Gordon!
A lot of years ago, and the "smartphones" cameras looks like this, and the compact cameras have a really much quallity of them. Great video, love it, and love this camera.
Great video as always Gordon, I love the optics and retro looks of these early Sony cameras. I wonder if you could talk sometime about the Sony T series cameras. Reason being: everyone is talking about the periscope technique on mobile phones to fit zoom cameras, but nobody seems to remember that Sony pioneered it with these ultra compact cameras many years ago
Another wonderful video. What a crazy thing this is! I wonder if you might be interested in doing a video about the four-thirds system. There is very little out there because most of it predated the rise of RU-vid reviews. And I would imagine most people nowadays only know Micro Four Thirds, but not the DSLR origins of it.
That's a good idea, although as you probably know, I already made several reviews of most 4/3 DSLRs and a few lenses in the early days of my main camera labs channel when I first moved to New Zealand. Could be worth a retrospective at some point.
Another fun review. Had to google some and found that you can still get battery and power replacement for the F1 today (not that you should). Also found USB to IrDa, but maybe you've tried that. I've never owned a Psion, but I believe the one you reviewed in March has IrDA. Same with the original iPaq if happen to have one. I used IrDa a lot to connect HP portables from the mid nineties. Worked really well and was fast enough for typical file sizes at that time.
Thanks! The issue is not just finding IrDA hardware, but the software to let the computer know it's receiving an image over IR from a camera! I've found someone with the old software, o I'll hopefully be able to try it out, and if it works, I can also try it on the Psion and my Dell X50v which also has IR!
The late 90s digital camera market was fascinating, so many solutions before it got standardized! I want to say that canon had a "camera" that really was a video still camera where you saved frames from a video saved on a minidisc like storage!
It's all a matter of perspective. This Sony DSC F1 would have been considered hi res compared to the 320x240 pixel monochrome Logitech FotoMan we had (for some long forgotten reason) at my office in the early 90s. The Sony's images remind me of the Lumiere brothers' Autochromes. Even today it might be an interesting tool in the hands of a fine art photographer. Now I'm motivated to unearth my very old Olympus digital and take if for a spin. Wonderful video, Gordon. A look back like this helps us appreciate our current embarrassment of digital riches.
My first digital camera was the Sony DSC-V3. It had a whopping 7 megapixels. It also had nightshot and a filter thread, meaning you could do infrared photography with it. Also, it focused using frikking laser beams.
Hi There! Very interesting to hear your comments about the F1. Have you considered a re-look at the excellent Panasonic Lumix LC1. Old, but a beautiful retro camera from the early days of Digital.
I have a Olympus [C-You] C1 Cammedia 1.3MP from 2001, luckily the last time I used it I could still get images of it via a usb cable... it makes my Fuji XE-1 seem super fast !
I love the fact that you were taking selfies in the late nineties! So ahead of the time! I though the Sony camera that I had which took floppy disks was one of the earliest but obviously not. The comparison to the Sony A1 seems fair, not much in it really :-)
My first one was the P1 in 2000, followed by the P10 and P100. Lament that I sold them years ago. Despite having much better cameras nowadays the thrill of using those first ones can never be replicated. Remember it was before we had smartphones let alone ones with a decent camera. That highly pocketable digital photo power was simply mind-blowing for young me. Great memories.
@@DinoBytes Did not know you had a retro channel. Love it! Subscribed to this and your cameralabs one. Cannot promise I won't cry tears of joy and nostalgia if you did a P-series video. 😉
Hi Gordon, love the video. I recently got my hands on this, and I'm struggling to extract the images. Are you able to elaborate a little more on how you managed to extract the images (the cable you used and other specs you had)? Thanks a bunch.
Long live Sony camera 📷, lol I'm still using a 1999 Sony PC 3 Mini DV camcorder that was still pretty much new but the original battery was dead, so I just ordered a new one off Amazon and I was away to the races, lol the tapes in my area are pretty cheap around 50 cents a tape so I picked up a few boxes, I sure enjoy the retro 90s images from the now old style tape
My first digital camera was the Sony DSC-F55 with the very similar swivel lens/sensor block. A whole of 3 megapixels but even for that time (2001) the image quality seemed so-so. It might still be operational (been a few years since I checked) but the batteries have long gone bust so it's kind of a tethered-only camera by the way of the dummy battery power adapter. :)
@@DinoBytes yes I believed my dad bought the first model. It used 3.5” floppy disk. I was in high school and tried using it in my photography class. It seemed like a gimmick and a joke, as the output was trash compared to 35mm film.
Nice comparison to the a1 but I'd be interested in comparing these images to something like a Kodak brownie, as they're both something like the first consumer approach to a new technology
I wonder would it send data via infrared to an early 2000's pocket pc. With a built in SD card slot like the Dell Axim series. To easily retrieve the pictures from the memory card
The Sony DSC-F1 has a resolution of 640X480 which is the same of the VGA resolution of monitors. For the common 800X600 or 1280X1024 monitors of the era the 640X480 was great for websites but not for high quality printing of photos. This camera was connected to computers via a serial port which required the shutdown before connection or the infrared port which was common with most laptops but not with desktops. The F1 was launched in 1996. I personally preferred the Sony Mavica FD5 and much more the very expensive FD7 with 10X zoom. Both were launched one year later in 1997. With both cameras, photos were stored in the very convenient common and affordable floppy disk. The FD7 and FD5 had a sensor with half the resolution at 320X240 (or 640X480 with software tricks) of Sony F1 . For the typical websites of the era designed for 800X600 pixels monitors the 320X240 resolution of photos was fine.
I actually used the F1 to take some photos of PC parts for an article I was writing in PCW magazine (mentioned in the video). They were actually still in the camera memory when I revived it for this review! The magazine printed at 300dpi, so 640x480 was good enough for really small images about 2x1.5in on the page, although we sometimes went a little bit bigger. You're right, for websites, they were fine, which I mentioned in my original review of the camera. I plan on reviewing the Mavicas again soon!
I've been given a camera and cable but no software and cannot find it anywhere to download. Managed to get the images out of it using a Sony Mavicap, which allows them to be saved, one by one, to floppy but I still would like the software.
Hi. I currently own this camera and am struggling to export photos from it because I do not have the original cables for it. Any alternatives that I can try? Perhaps a RS-232C cable would it work?
It's very hard, you'd need the original Sony cable, Sony software and a 1990's PC to run it on. In the absence of all this, you'll need to do what I did in the video.
Oh, those were the days when manufacturers tried new fun solutions. The Hitachi MP-EG1 was another fun camera in the same period, it was announced in 1996 and came on the market in 1997 and recorded MPEG video and JPEGs to a built in detachable PCMCIA/PC Card harddrive that was moved over to the PC and inserted in that slot and read as an external drive. I reviewed it for a computer magazine and brought it along to a party and let everyone there play with it. That was before I knew the cost of it! :-)
@@DinoBytes I am based in Sweden and have been working for several computer magazines at different publishing houses, among those IDG\Sweden, the review of the MP-EG1 was for "Mikrodatorn".
@@lattesweden cool, I used to work for Personal Computer World magazine in the UK, and also freelanced for several IDG titles a long time ago, like PC Advisor, which I think was known outside the UK as PC World.
@@DinoBytes In Sweden we had, PC World, Windows World and also Mac World of the international titles, but they mostly contained locally written stuff. In my days we had about 12 monthly magazines, a few weekly ones and Computer Sweden that came out several times per week. Also we had a book publishing division that translated the "for dummies" books and also had locally written ones. And we had an Expo division that did Exhibitions. We were about 230 people plus all freelancers. It was fun and I really learned a lot about publishing but it was also a rather hard environment.
@@lattesweden sounds a lot like where I worked too. In the 90s. there were so many computer magazines in the UK, it was ridiculous, and lots of them did very well.
I think I had a Finepix 4700 as well - I am going to try and check metadata tomorrow. It was great in its day. The issue was shutter lag. The ‘Decisive Moment’ had to be anticipated!
The Dynamic Range of direct output looks better from the 25yrs ago camera. Most of the photos feels like paintings from the Renaissance. May be try some portrait would be more surprising.
I love the innovation early Sony cameras had, from cameras like this, the Mavica range to the Sony F505. It's almost like one corner of the R&D department had a giant pile of cash and equivalent amount of LSD and got told design a new camera, just don't be conventional.
Have come across a link for the Windows software but can't verify it as I use Macs and attempts to post it have been thwarted by RU-vid, the posts just vanishing!
I think I found what claimed to be the windows software a whole back, but it was academic since I didn't have the cable. Also a lot of old drivers are a bit dodgy, some of the download sites just use the product name to attract visitors.
Well, I would say the F1 is the clear winner of the comparison(just kidding of course 😁). Have you thought about getting(or revamping, if you still own one) an older PC with serial port for such retro purposes? I got an IBM(not Lenovo) Thinkpad for 25 bucks a while ago, from 2004. It still has some of the old ports, but also USB if I want to transfer files to newer devices.
@@DinoBytes Yeah, one of these old machines should to the job. It´s also fun to set up and use such an old device after some decades. You can also make videos about them on this channel - I would watch that!
@@insaneclownkitty no problem asking, I just wanted to make sure you knew how I'd done it. What were you using to capture the TV signal from the camera output? Maybe there's a problem with it, or maybe you need to change the video system between PAL and NTSC?
Review is great and images are awesome. Post these on IG and just about no one would ever know where they came from or complain about the quality. All of which further seals my forever opinion that at 1080x1080 as most IG photos are displayed as and viewed on phone screens, 100MP or half a megapixel images look just about the same.. and that's before you slap "filters" on them by which time the colors, proper rendition and any sort of remaining IQ are all further thrown out the window. We live in the most pathetically ridiculous and hipocritical time in human history.
Check out my Sony u20 review with 2 Megapixels - that's enough uncropped for IG, but the F1 is a bit of a push! Might be fun to see what's possible though.
Yep.. 2MP is more than enough for IG.. hilarious, just hilarious.. and lets not talk about IG stories or the compression they do on any sent or received video.. is literally below VGA quality.. but so it goes. As the acquiring Megapixels go up, the viewing Megapixels go down hahaha
Yeah, and at the time there was SVGA (super VGA) which included a few resolutions like 800x600 and 1024x768, but now the 800x600 is called SVGA and 1024x768 is called XGA.
@@user-pe4pl5fx8r I don't know the name ogf it, it's just the cable that came with it. Your best bet is to try and find a review of the camera that listed the accessories or find a manual for it which will have the model name of the cable.
@@user-pe4pl5fx8r or you could use an old laptop with infra red to use the IRDA connection. It won't be easy which is why I just took the TV output and grabbed frames from that using a video capture device.
£650 in late 1990's money for THAT! Around £1300 in today's money. My goodness the value and performance, whether you link the two or not, is outstanding in 2021, or was horrendous in 1997, whichever way you prefer to look at it.
@@DinoBytes Ugh, no kidding. I just did some searching and came up dry, as well. Looks like there might have been experimental support added to the linux gPhoto application at some point, but the original software seems lost.
@@ziginox I'm still hoping to get it working at some point, ideally with IR so I don't need to find the cable, but I'll need an old laptop, old OS and the old Sony software too!
I was too young to understand, how Digital Cameras could be much worse then Film Cameras. Now I know, worse quality, less picture capacity. But, I guess you don't need the darkroom.
Not Sony's first digital camera www.digitalkameramuseum.de/en/cameras/item/sony-dkc-5000 But equal second www.digitalkameramuseum.de/en/cameras/item/sony-dkc-id1 www.digitalkameramuseum.de/en/cameras/item/sony-dsc-f1 Maybe you could say first consumer camera (affordable), but Sony's first.
