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Showing posts from January, 2024

A camera that uses a storage medium everyone has on hand!

  SD Cards are ubiquitous these days - but they weren't in 2001. In fact, the format wars for flash storage mediums were still underway, with Sony's Memorystick, Fujifilm's XD cards, the SD card (a collaboration between Toshiba, SanDisk, and Panasonic that, as we know, eventually won out), the CF card, and others.  Anyone wanting to use a device that required one of these needed both the card format, as well as a card reader for said format for one's computer. That could add quite a bit of cost to using such a device. So what did you do if you were Sony and you wanted to produce a digital camera for the masses without proprietary memory card formats as a barrier to entry? You built a camera that took a media format that was cheap, everywhere, and that everyone's computers could read - the floppy disk! Enter the Mavica: Sony's 'inexpensive' digital camera line. My model, the MVC-FD75, sold in 2001 for $500 USD, the equivalent of $860 today (2023). It took
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