Invendiscovry

 Ok, so I may have caught the vintage digicam bug for a bit. After playing with the Mavica, I was really impressed with its simple user interface and the quality of its photos (in terms of color, not resolution).  I wanted a camera that would give similar results, but without the resolution limitations. Despite the Mavica being the most popular camera of the time, Sony was making more professional grade compact cameras around the same time. I wanted something with at least a few megapixels so it would still be usable on modern screens, and ended up with the DSC-S85. The S85 is a pretty nice little CCD sensor, 4.0MP camera. It has auto modes, but also has a fully manual mode, including focus, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. I'm not a professional by any means - but I do enjoy having a little bit of room to mess with settings, so I'm glad the manual mode is there. Aside from photos, it also takes videos - but these are . . . potato quality. Here, I'll show you what I mean. ...

  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...