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.

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.

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 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!

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.

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.

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

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}

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Great video! Had a buddy who had one in high school, we were able to use it to take pictures of ourselves, then skin ourselves into the OG unreal tournament. Those were the days lol!

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 have been finding so much vintage tech lately at our dump. Thank you for the great content!

Oh hey I'm glad you decided to get your Mavica out!

OMG I remember those!! Never had one but those were the times just before CF and SD storage. My first digital camera feaured 3.2 megapixel sensor and the storage was a 32 MB Sony Memory Stick card.

Love the Hamm's beer pillow!

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.

I had the pleasure of using a similar model, and the following model that had USB (when 500MB was large). Now, as then, the still image quality, remains impressive. And the floppy drive is double speed. I keep a couple of old boxes with floppy drives. Very handy, when needed (like a spare wheel). $10, what a score! Great presentation, keep em’ coming! 5 second videos, great for those little inverted video comments, like the “. . . moments later “, taken from Spungebob SquarePants 😂

My home-ec teacher had one, I'd say this was between 96-98, it was so freaking cool, I'd never seen anything but film cameras, my dad was a photographer so I knew basically what it was but the floppy aspect was just freaking me out, my teacher let me use it for an afternoon taking pics of the class. Fond Memories.

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.

I absolutely ADORE my FD-91. Chunky old digital with big optical zoom. So great for getting that early 2000s feel capturing cityscapes. Also tried my hand at doing motorcycle action shots which is really tough with the AF and saving to disk time lol, but I still love it regardless.

Two words: Night Shot. This camera and it's siblings took THE best low light shots of any camera of it's era. I would argue that it still holds up against even the best phone cameras of the day. Lower res, yes - but it just had a serene glow to it that made those shots amazingly beautiful. Mine was a dual floppy-Sony MemoryStick version. Sony - no baloney!

Found one at goodwill and love just because of what it is.

Years ago at my former library we were able to check these cameras out

Somehow, any pictures you have taken feel nostalgic.

That brings back memories. We used to have one of those at work many, many years ago.

Yep, the mavica was my first introduction to digital imaging. Hey, it was klunky but it works so much better than anything else. I had an MP3 player that loaded 32mb at a time over parallel. And took a solid hour to do so. So to spit out a disc litterally every thing could read, is pretty neat. The mavica was my first exposure to digital images. Hey, this is viable! And in that era, we were just used to swapping floppies. That's what you did. You got a swish new game, you fed the machine floppies. We did get CD ROMs, eventually, but they were expensive, n good luck convincing Dad you needed one of them. I think the mavica line survived so well, anything vaguely computer shaped would work. Windows 3 to 98. A floppy with photos on it. No fancy flash card adaptor, nothing clever. A package of data that looks like a picture. Which is all anyone really wanted.

I had an FD-85. Sold it about a week later and bought the FD-95. Still have it. I also got the sony memory stick floppy disk. Holds more than a floppy for sure. it was a whopping 128MB stick! I used it for my web site back in the day too. Sigh. Those were the days.

These are the camera of nostalgia for our generation! Same as you, I was able to check one out from school. Several memories were captured with the camera. When one came up for sale on the county surplus auction a few years ago I bought it for $5. I kept it on the shelf in the living room for a while and everyone that saw it was always excited and said "I remember those!". Then I moved it to a box in the basement so as you said, it will confuse the next generation at the estate sale...

I still own one. These cameras are great for near field photography. Floppies are easy to read with a small usb floppy drive reader.

I remember those in college They were VERY battery hungry. It was nice with the direct to disk feature. I eventually upgraded it to use a CF card when the disk mechanism died, and later was upgraded to a laptop hard drive. Then the SD card cameras came out and the camera ended up at an auction 😅

Very cool device. Surprisingly good quality photos. It is very unique in the fact that it was designed with very modern gear but was limited by floppy discs limited capacity and was built just before flash memory got more common so it kinda marks the very start of a new tech era right before it blew up.

You know you found something great when it quickly becomes one of your favourite channels, thank you for sharing, I know you will quit pushing forward, love the energy!

Neato! Haven't even heard a floppy drive run in 15 years, heh heh.

I remember really wanting one of these when they were state of the art. To me it just made sense to store photos on 3.5'' floppy disks since they were so ubiquitous. Really tickles me how difficult it would be these days to read that format. Thanks for the video.

I had one of those back in 00-01 I thought was like the coolest things

Remember this from like year 2000 as my buddy got one of these, my first in same year was 1Mpix HP C20! Yes I am old! 😆

I used one of those in high school. The entire yearbook was done with that bad boy..

Mann ... your making my hard-drive work haha .. remembering a bunch of stuff after that sound 3:35

Wow, I had one of them in 1999. Great times.

Ahh my friend got one of these when it came out. It was great, we used to take a bunch of dirty pictures of our girlfriends with it. It completely overcame the problem of taking film in and worrying about the worker making their own copies, or using expensive poloroids

I tried one in 1998 or 1999 while in elementary school. 5 schools bought just 1 camera together and had it on the rotation, because of the huge price. I've never heard anything about this camera since that before your video!

I have six of these from my work in real estate. Pretty reliable.

This is wonderful technology that allows you to create small science fiction short films that portray the technical conditions of the millennium. And show how familiar HDMI behaves differently when filmed ... My suggestion: set up something that makes the future look like the past and vice versa. ....thx for the vid.

I've been taking my Mavica around Minneapolis-St. Paul lately, I absolutely love this line of camera!

I remember that Mavica from 3rd grade computer lab. We were supposed to take a picture of something for kidpix editing, but I took a selfie. Teacher was like "who's the goofball that took a picture of themself?"

This was the first digital camera I ever used. I was in 7th grade and we had to check it out from the school library.

Identical to the first digital camera I ever messed with. My stepdad was a real estate appraiser and had several different digital cameras that saved to floppy over the years.

Got to use one briefly in my highschool years. Props to Sony using an easily available media storage format at the time.

This brought back so many memories! 😂

I used those extensively! They were fabulous in an institutional setting. The organization that I worked with just gave us a brick of floppy disks and off we went.

Nice museum piece. I like that, back in the day in Alaska, shotguns in the dorm weren't problematic.

I started selling on ebay using those, used a casio before. The floppy was very convenient at the time. The last one could use a memory stick.

That window at the top of the display that lights up probably would've been used to pick up sunlight. You would leave your backlight off, and the window would shine sunlight into the display, while you saved battery life.

An interesting follow up video would be to explore the capabilities of this camera with the memory card adapter. 😎👍

My grade-school assigned me to be the one that 'used' these for class projects. They also had me use the Apple and another 'PC' one that's binocular shaped (Nikon or Canon?) - Mostly because I didn't keep mixing up discs/media and batteries, then taking them home in my pockets. Learning how to work around the limitations/quirks of the different cameras was fun ; Though (also given the wide variety of flatbed scanners they had me setup for a week-at-a-time) I kinda wonder if they were using me to do product testing/reviews for some purchasing decisions.

For it's time, it was an interesting piece of kit to have, I'd imagine. I could just see myself with this, taking shots, with a box or 2 of 10 3.5" floppy discs in the same bag I kept my camera in. Much like the predecessor of a film camera, you'd have to be quite conservative when it came to what pictures you took, due to not having a huge amount of disk space available. Although, it would be a bit better, due to not only being able to view what photos you'd taken immediately afterwards, but I'd imagine the ability to delete any you didn't want to keep, thus freeing up space to take others. I'd imagine this camera was right on the cusp of when flash memory cards were beginning to appear, with the obvious combination of the two, not too far on the horizon. Unless, of course, this was deemed as a cheaper alternative to cameras with internal memory/flash cards already on the market.

Hey, I love your videos! Always fun to watch.

Lol I love your philosophy on the meaning of life being to just leave weird stuff for future generations of estate sales! 😂

My dad had a mavica with the floppy for a bit. Compared to my first digital camera it was amazing. In 98 I bought a Casio QV-700 digital camera. No zoom, 640x480 and needed a special program to convert them from whatever native format to jpg. Still, it was a digital camera when most people were still on film. One thing I just remembered about this camera was the lens was on a swivel so you could flip it forward or rotate it 180° and point it back to you. It was a selfie Cam ahead of its time.

I have about 40 floppy disks full of photos from 24 years ago taken on a Mavica. I have to find a way to hook up this vintage drive I have so I can see the good old days.

My dad had one of those in 2002 or so and used it for his real estate business. I'd sit in his office all summer playing runescape and I'd get annoyed when he'd interrupt me to have me load a few pictures from the floppy drives onto his website.

I'm always surprised by how good the photo and video quality is on those older cameras. Aside from the lack of storage space and speed, that seems to be a pretty decent unit!

I had one when I was a failure analyst engineer for Lite-on bought it HongKong.

I found one at a thrift store years ago and it’s a lovely (low MP) camera

OMG, I had one of these! This was my first digital camera!

My favorite vintage Tech from when I was a kid does a laptop that had no hard drive it had two three and a half inch floppy disk drive like that so you'd have one with your programs and one to save your files

The digital camera I used in high school regularly with my homeroom teacher. I'd have to take pictures of class events.

Absolutely my favorite video so far.

I had one of these too! So cool.

Holy crap, a Mavica! Gimme a few weeks, got go find mine.

I wanna say I used one in the late 1990's for the school newspaper....

I still have one of these, it's the MVC-FD91

ahh yes floppy disks vhs encoding technology in a cd like shape

Always fun to watch !

I remember using one of these at work years ago. Looking back, the quality was pretty awful but it was groundbreaking at the time.

You basically bought a Time Machine for under ten bucks. How convenient!! (I remember this camera coming out too. 💀 Life is an estate sale ☠️ )

Cool room!

Considering how rare the media is becoming there is a good chance the floppy disks outvalue the camera by now.

I had this exact camera at work in 2003

Some of the later mavica also supported a floppy disk alternative that had a higher storage volume, so that video mode would have recorded a minute and a half of video on the alternate media. If I remember correctly, there was an adapter that slid into the floppy drive, and adapted it

College in the early 200s? I thought you were significantly younger! By the way, very interesting piece of tech, and still better results than modern fake HD mini cameras.

First time i evere hear of such a camera

I have 3 of these . The aesthetic they have .. THe images have a warmth in them .. But , unfortunetly they all died from the InfoLithum Battery .. oh these DRMs....

I'm so glad someone else can't get screen-cap to work on OBS

I still have mine!!! Cheers from Austin Texas.

I had access to that camera … it had a mode where it would take 9 small photos in sequence for 1 640x480 pic. I made a photoshop droplet that that created optimized animated gifs from that. Fun times!

Awesome find! ...I could only imagine what that camera cost back then!

I kind of want one of the models with the 2 or 4 x speed floppy drive and USB connector, then I can use it as a high speed floppy drive and have a neat camera to boot!

Pretty good considering the age and one of the first digital cameras

I have two of the CD Mavicas. Still take decent pics, but finding the little CD-RWs is getting harder these days. Got great shots of the 2017 eclipse with one.

I have one of these, the slightly older version i think. MVC-FD91

My dad still have his camcorder the one with the small tapes