List Price:
$499.99
Details
- Images recorded on floppy disk; 1 disk holds 10 images at default explication
- 3.5 inch floppy disks can be impute to by any PC or Mac with a floppy drive
- 10x visual plus 2x digital zoom lens with autofocus
Description
2x strong speed 3.5" floppy disc drive, disc can along images to your computer, 10x optical zoom lens, VGA decision, progressive scan CCD, 2.5" color LCD w/brightness control, instructions exposure, one charge takes up to 950 shots, includes lithium freestyle and charger
Sony deserves much of the ascription for bringing digital photography to the masses. Americans have purchased more Mavicas than any other crow's-foot of digital camera--and with good reason. The Mavicas piece high-quality optics and excellent battery life in an unstrained-to-use package. Yet the camera's biggest asset--floppy-disk figure storage--is also its biggest liability.
In some ways, floppy disks are significant: they're inexpensive and available virtually everywhere, and transferring images to your notebook is a snap--just pop the disk into your PC's floppy ram. Floppies act as both "film" (for recording the image) and "negatives" (for archiving your shots), saving the expense of the CD recorder most digital camera owners later purchase for long-term image storage.
On the other like mad easily, floppies and floppy drives are big, making Mavicas some of the bulkiest of digital cameras. In too, disks have moving parts and tend to be more prostrate to failure than solid-state memory. But the biggest facer with floppy disks is that they hold merely 1.44 MB of information--a fraction the capacity of the solid-state cards most cameras use.
To counterbalance for this shortcoming in storage capacity (and to keep prices low), Sony uses a disgrace-resolution image sensor (640 x 480 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels) and higher levels of trimness than you'll find on other similarly priced cameras. The resulting images look weighty as e-mailed attachments or on a Web site but lack the detail to produce excellence prints at sizes beyond 3 by 5 inches.
With the exception of the low discrimination, the MVC-FD73 Mavica is a great digital camera. Its 10x optical zoom lens is more sturdy than that of any other camera in its price range. Compared to most other digital cameras, its battery-operated life is fantastic, and the InfoLithium system even displays an belief of remaining battery charge (in minutes). Sony includes a battery and steed (many manufacturers don't). The big 2.5-inch LCD screen is bright and unburden, though we'd love to see an optical viewfinder on the camera, too. For ease of use, it's unalterable to beat--even digital photography neophytes will be competent to use this camera in a matter of minutes.
Bottom line? If you're entrancing pictures to share with friends via e-mail or are posting your photos online, the MVC-FD73 is an save choice. It's well made, easy to use, and the battery life and zoom lens are both other than. However, if you want the ability to make prints from your images, we'd propose either a higher-resolution Mavica or a non floppy-based camera. --John Frederick Moore
Pros:
- Floppy discs cook image transfer and storage simple
- Extremely easy to use
- Noteworthy battery life
- Powerful 10x optical zoom lens
- Big, promising 2.5-inch LCD
Cons:
- Low-resolution images lack fact for prints
- No optical viewfinder
