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- čas přidán 3. 06. 2014
- Dave tears down Sony's first digital camera that used removable media, a 3.5" floppy drive! The 640x480 resolution 0.3Mpixel 1997 vintage Sony Mavica MVC-FD7
Original image files here:
www.eevblog.com/files/Mavica/
Sorry, couldn't get all, the PC floppy drive is failing...
Datasheets:
www.alldatasheet.net/datasheet...
UPD72069 Floppy-Disk Controller
www.ic-on-line.cn/view_downloa...\upd72069_239054.pdf
AD9801 CCD image sensor processor
www.alldatasheet.com/datasheet...
MB90089 OSD: pdf.datasheetcatalog.com/datas...
SH7032 32 Bit Microcontroller:
www.renesas.com/products/mpumc...
MB3785A Switching Regulator:
pdf.datasheetcatalog.com/datas...
Teardown Photos: www.eevblog.com/2014/06/04/eev...
Forum: www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eev...
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These early Mavicas used the same image sensor as Sony's digital camcorders of the time, so when you took a photo, it basically just grabbed a still frame from the video sensor and saved it to disk. The later models had a 1 or 2 megapixel image sensor and could record short video clips to disk -- but you could only fit about 15 seconds of video on one disk, so it was really just a gimmick.
guess thats the reason for the odd vertical mirrored lens, too. they just took the whole assembly out of a camcorder and mirrored it vertical to fit in the still camera body. love the 90th tech .D
I love VWestlife
i realize it's pretty randomly asking but does anybody know a good website to watch newly released series online ?
Many of the project images on my website at www.bigclive.com were shot on a Sony Mavica camera. It produced extremely good images with really small file sizes which made it ideal for the early days of dial-up Internet. There are times I look at the large files and crap image quality of more recent cameras and wonder if I should go back to using it! All my images these days are 640 by 480 which is does by default.
Nice. I have one of these, and the "macro" zoom is incredible. It was like nothing else back in the day!
We picked up several of these cameras when they were introduced, to take pictures to be displayed on a television station. They worked beautifully, and were highly appreciated by everyone who got to use them.
Since the late 80's videocameras were using digital image sensors. However the portable storage of digital data was very difficult and expensive then. So the digital data was converted to analog signal and saved to magnetic tapes.
The Mavica with floppy disk was actually a videocamera that was saving digital data in the very convenient floppy disk. The resolution of photos was 320 X 240. For static objects it could be with double capture 640 X 480.
At that time many PC monitors had the typical 800 X 600 resolution. So the 320 x 240 photos weren't small at all. This camera was very expensive and the ability of avoiding the expensive film was highly important.
This model was heavily promoted to UK schools as the digital camera to buy due to the floppy drive. They where discounted at £680. I wonder how many of these are now at the back of the coffee cupboard in school staffroom's gathering dust!
Probably here in Denmark too, I remember using this circa 2002 for the school newspaper and getting so tired of the slowness of the camera that I brought my own circa 1999 Olympus 1.3mpx camera with a Smartmedia card.
My first digital camera was the Nikon Coolpix 990 back in early 2000, also revolutionary with its rotating optics. Cool one Dave!
Copied from Casio who did that 2 or 3 years earlier, nothing revolutionary about it.
awesome teardown & great to see it working still.
I used one of these cameras for quite a while. It was super handy for eBay, the pictures were already 640x480 so I didn't need to resize them, and the lens system and zoom seemed to work well. The super low quality of the .jpgs was a problem though. If there weren't so many artifacts in the .jpgs I would have used this camera for much longer, probably even gotten the memory stick adapter for it!
This was an absolutely delightful teardown! I loved using these things back in the late 90s.
really appreciate the new layout with the monitor in the back.
Not sure if it would be gimmicky or not?
EEVblog neah not actually hey, great for datasheets, product presentations or any crazy idea.
*****
I could post-edit datasheets or other shots in, but that's extra work which I'd never bother to do, and I do just like the look of the monitor there
EEVblog Either way you do it, having something behind you to display some interesting information for the things you present in the intro is cool.
I had used it during my first job, where I had to take pictures of automobile parts, which had come for servicing. The camera was very helpful to record observations and make reports. Back then, this camera was very expensive and needed special permission to use it.
Impressed by the quality of your video. Congratulations on your setup
I bought a used FD5 off a guy back in the day and it shot really great close-ups of some micro RC stuff I was doing at the time (2001-2002).
Easy as pie to use and the images were indeed quite postable to the forums!
Great stuff , Dave! Thanks!
I remember Sony Mavica since 1998. The MAgnetivVIdeoCAmera was revolutionary then. Flash storage storage media was unknown by most consumers and the magnetic floppy disk storage was very popular. Sony continuesd that practice with cameras which were recording photos in small CD-R instead of flash memory cards.
First in 1998, USB ports were very new and rare in computers. Also smart media flash memory cards were very new and there weren't card readers. The SD cards appeared much later.
The common way to use a photograph in a computer was to use a scanner. Scanners were affordable and popular then. Some scanners since then could directly scan the film.
Most displays then had a resolution of 800X600. So a photo of 640X480 was big enough. Also the small resolution could not show problems of lens sharpness and chromatic aberration. Very convenient for the digital camera manufacturers who avoided the use of quality lenses. Since the resolution of photos was so small their size was small too. Today most photos in Instagram and Facebook are about 100-200 Kbytes. A 640X480 photo was about 30-50 Kbytes. The ambiguous 1.44 Mbytes floppy disks had a huge capacity and was easy to carry a packet of cheap ten floppy disks. The 640X480 wasn't native and not interpolated like most early digital cameras were doing. The Sony Mavica was an expensive camera with good quality.
A mouse was connected through serial port. Many computers didn't even have ps/2 ports. Scanners were connected with the much faster parallel port. And that parallel port was shared with the printer.
+Achilleas Labrou Mac computers had SCSI ports. Nice and easy periods then. Not so many kinds of USB connectors, FireWire, thunder port etc. However in 1998 all computers desktops all laptops had floppy disk drives. CD recorders were still very very expensive and Zip drives not affordable by anyone.
The Sony Mavica like most early digital compact cameras was shooting good photos only during daylight with native ISO. The high ISO of early image sensors was horrible. The photos of Sony Mavica were equally good of early iphone models. Simply great for ordinary amateur use. Scanned film photos were still superior but the difference of cost was immense. The cost of a cheap 36 exposures film roll was 3$ and the development 6$. 9$/36= 0.25$ for each photo. Not very pricey but you have to wait for all the film to be be used, plus the development time, plus the digital scanning time.
+Achilleas Labrou Each shot was important because it had a cost. This isn't bad though. Film era made photographers more careful about what they were shooting. The cost of Sony Mavica was high 1300$ but the cost of photos was nearly zero. So 1300$/0.25$=5,200 film photos. To brake-even with Sony Mavica someone had to shoot 5,200 digital photo. It seems that the film photos weren't more expensive. However people like me can shoot easily 300 photos during every day of trip. Digital cameras have spoiled photographers who are shooting constantly.
Used Mavica cameras cost 50-100$ in ebay. Nevertheless most of them don't have battery or their battery doesn't work and is hard to find a battery that is working good for a Mavica cameras. The battery problem is common with vintage digital cameras. Also is hard to find a Mavica in mint condition at a low price.
These cameras were popular in the USA with Real Estate Appraisers. They shot digital images for their reports and then saved each 3.5" floppy for each job along with the paper report in the file cabinet
I had a pleasure to use this camera around 99.It took rather good pictures compared to other digital cameras from that time period.I always wondered how it was built,thanks for video!
Great stuff. The camera setup you have on the microscope is awesome! Really looking foward to seeing more small surface mount teardowns and maybe some rework.
A tractor shop up the road from where I live still uses a Mavica camera for online sales; its the 1MP model from a couple of years later. They say it's never given them any trouble from the day they bought it.
Cool teardown Dave Jones!
There is one of these FD cams at the school where I work. It was in use for taking student ID shots till just a couple years ago.
Also it sounds like there is some 48/44.1KHz sample rate mismatch (or very lossy compression) artifacting in parts of your audio. Especially noticeable around @28:55
But I am an audio engineer, so may be one of a handful who would ever notice it.
Cheers!
They were fun cameras to use. We got to use them in high school in our IT class.
I am only now getting into mavica collecting and it is incredible! The photos look like 90s. I love it.
Wish you did teardown of fd91 model! It is extremely complicated!
7:04 that's a mirrorless camera, not a digital slr.
I have a vague recollection of a predecessor to this that recorded an analogue signal to one track of a floppy - not sure if it made it to production though
The Sony Mavica? It was produced, and it was popular with TV studios for when they had to display stills. It used it's own floppy format, though.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy
Yeah, that's the original Mavica line from the 80's. They used a custom format and was a different beast entirely, designed for the TV studios.
Circa 1978 I worked with an Arvin Echo Discassette which recorded one frame per track. The floppy was bigger than an LP record and was encased in a rigid holder. Because the inner tracks were considerably shorter than the outer ones, and it was an analog recording,it had a follow pot on the head actuator which changed equalization as the head moved in/out. It did not have a frame buffer, so you had to be careful about playing one track continuously lest you wear out that track.
EEVblog Please upload the picture somewhere
back in 1997, it was my dream toy.
Imagine you could shoot anything and have it displayed on your pc immediately in full color digital image, share the fd with friends, etc.
very expensive though, more than the price of my pc back then (asus p55t2p4, pentium 120 mhz, 2gb quantum fb, 32MB EDO RAM).
my, what a dream.
Awesome, thanks for the cool video Dave!
Holy Crap! Thank you for these extensive looks at ancient tech! This is an impressive amount of info! Love the floppy disk.
Great video. Love the microscope and video quality is great. Funny thing is I still have an old FD5 version of this camera, still has the battery and charger. What an awesome little piece of history.
*bangs Dave on head*
The NEX camera is not an SLR! It's a mirrorless camera!
durn all this newfangled technology
You're right. It is a mirrorless camera. Except it has a mirror ;p
Steven Flanagan Please explain to me on how NEX cameras have mirrors.
Where specifically, that is.
I am not talking about misc stuff.
Sorry I thought you were talking about the Sony camera. My bad.
Steven Flanagan They both are sony .-.
I am aware that the SLT series has a translucent and fixed mirror, I own one.
Brings back memories of using a black and white Logitech Fotoman in the early 90s. Still got some photos on the computer that were taken with it back then... Was a bit of a revolution instead of using film, getting it developed then having to scan it in with a 'hand' scanner.... sigh, those were the days :D
Another thing we take for granted: running off mains! Those (proprietary) batteries were charged by an external charger.
Love it! Wish I had one just because of history. I used this frequenly at work to create documentation, it was great!
Great teardown Dave!
I received one of those as a gift back in the day. And it was a BIG DEAL. Awesome video :)
love the retro camera tear downs thanks!
I used one of these throughout middle school (grades 6-8, age 11-14), and I'm 24 now, brings back a lot of memories, mostly good! haha thanks EEVblog
I smiled the whole way through this. Thanks for sharing!
One "high resolution" photo per floppy IIRC. The zoom being optical was a bonus. I just 'upgraded' to a Sony QX-10 for my iPhone to get a true 10x optical zoom. Enjoy.
great technology, great teardown!
A mate of mine had one of these when they first came out, everyone had one of those friends i'm sure... I used to buy bulk lots of 50 floppies from K-Mart for about $25.00 at the time IIRC. ahhh memories ....
I'll tell you what's incredible: the optics that camera and a few (1-2) models after had.
I have a 1.2mpx version. Had to buy a usb floppy drive for it but damn... the optics quality is far better than all today's entry level digital cameras. I could compare it with a 50mm Vivitar.
Would love to see the photos from the floppy!
Cudos for the vertical monitor on the back... nice!
We still have the MVC-FD5, used it up until about 2002! It also had quite a usable macro mode.
Jeez those photos aren't bad, that quality is better than half the photos people put up on Gumtree
Video quality is fantastic, keep up the good work my man.
One of my high school technology classes had one of these that we used to take photos of our projects and then include them into our power-point presentation. This was back in 2004! Now, we have smart phones that can take ~8MP( Nokia's Lumia is 41MP) or 1080p videos that can fit into our pockets.
I had one of these. It was pretty cool at the time. I used to take photos with it at car shows and since the floppy had such little storage capacity I had to walk around with pockets filled with floppy disks. LOL
The floppy drive was the reson why i got the CAM back in´99 (used for 400DM).... And had a lot of fun with it. As one can use it for macro photos as well with no lens change...:)
Always informative, thank you.
Very nice had those at school but it had a light pipe to make the LCD viewable in sunlight! Also the microscope has an excellent picture! I suspect it is also used as a video magnifier for the visually impaired.
Great stuff. One of these turned up in a box of IT junk at work recently. Amazing how big and heavy they are.
Can see some similarities to Sony's camcorders from a similar time, like the TRV66. The ccd / lens module looks similar to ones used in video cameras (sans the mirror). Those daft picture effects were prominent on Sony camcorders at the time as well. With the character generator working in the analog domain you have to wonder if this is more of a video camera that takes digital stills??
Ok, I'm rather late to the party, but yes it's very much as you say, they seemed to borrow heavily from their camcorders, hence indeed the character generator and effects. I recently came across one of these, the FD-91, which has picture stabilisation, and it's got the 'SteadyShot' stickers all over it just like their video cameras did, also when you choose the capture resolution, in the fine mode, you're capturing two interlaced fields!
Amazing how fast this technology has grown. But a powerful consumer market and big component manufacturer multinationals like Samsung, Sony etc. certainly stimulates this evolution. Curious to see what the next 20 years will bring :)
I agree, who's ready for gigapixel cameras and 1000X optical zoom. How about a 1EB flash drive? Man that would be epic being able to hold the entire web of today in one's pocket. I carry around a 500GB Verbatim pocketdrive 24/7 and its a 2011 I think. Transcend is expecting to have perfected a 1-3TB flash drive in a couple years. Dont wanna know the initial price! Will buy when when they get cheaper. It is amazing how fast things advanced, to tell you the truth my PC is almost vintage if this camera is. Funny thing is a 2001 GPU pushes 35-40FPS in Nexuiz and 25FPS in Minecraft. Not too bad for its age. All things have their time and purpose. People may laugh at cameras like this, but remember my words, in 10 years people would point at them and laugh at their "high end" phones, computers and consoles. That is unless there is a EMP or all out nuclear war (not joking, the possibility is high).
That f/1.8 zoom lens was state of the art. I doubt there is any 10x zoom lens with such fast aperture these days.
I used Casio QV-3000EX as the second digital camera (not actually mine). Made in 2000, had 3 Mpix and wonderful Canon optics with 3x zoom and f/2.0-f/2.5 which were still really professional parameters the regular compacts couldn't match. It run of 4 AA batteries (and burned them quickly) :) But the image quality was really great on that, the pictures are still usable even on today's monitors at full screen.
Getting a 403 on your "Original image files" link.
The first Sony Mavica cameras came out in the 80's. 1981 to be exact. I used a Mavica in HS back in '92. The early predigital (yes, analog) cameras used a very obscure format called VFDs (Video Floppy Disks). You could store 50 pictures on a 2" disk. Even play them back on a stand alone reader. We used a frame capture card to digtized them on to a Mac II cx. Look it up on Wikipedia
Ya I remember these. I remember a lot of people thought these were junk compared to a decent cheaper film camera. Film cam and a scanner was the preferred way to do "digital photos" back then :) I remember any flash media back then was extremely expensive and I don't think they were more than 4 or 8MB. So the FD Cams in general were better, even though the camera cost a lot, you saved the money with using cheap floppy disks. Mostly marketed to take photos for your website, which back then was childlike compared to today. 640x480 was high res back then.
I used to have a MVC-FD73. Also ran into later one that used CD-RWs instead of floppy discs at school.
When that floppy dropped out my face made a big smile
I really like the microscope camera. Makes those chips looks so good.
Yeah, it's pretty sweet. I can get similar zoom with my camera and macro lens, but it's not nearly as convenient to use.
Erwin Ried
I love the zoom text just for the fact that it's in hex :D
EEVblog Hi Dave nice teardown as always . tomorrow is my dad's birthday and I want to buy a microscope camera for him, I think yours is good enough ,can you please tell me the exact product name or site address ?
pooya payvar ok found it :)
Shortly after that, Panasonic came out with the PV-SD4090 which could not only use floppies, but LS120 super discs as well. It was my first digital in 1999 1.3 mega pixel and the floppy compatibility was great to use on any computer, no cable or software required. It's still listed on Amazon!
I used to use this SONY floppy camera ~14years ago! I was a teenager back then. so much sweet memories! still got pictures with my lovely wife when we were just dating :D
Surely he didn't realize the black 3.5'' Floppy disk logo sticker on the front of the camera... So, everyone knew from the beginning of the video which kind of media this camera use!
Man, i got one of these on loan once. I was so fucking cool with that thing draped around my neck. It would fit a handfull of photos, so you'd have to carry around a bunch of floppy disks you could put straight into your computer - so hip
Never knew Sony released a cam with a floppy storage lol, crazy. Its no wonder they had good lenses, this cam looks like a spill over from their camcorders which have always been of good quality, especially when this cam was released.
Hi Dave! It should be at 8.4 V, that's what full capacity of 2-cell Lithium Ion battery is (2 x 4.2 V). The lowest is about 7.0 maybe, maybe even less. :-) Don't ask me why LiIon and LiPoly batteries are marked like that - 3.7 V per cell, or 7.4 V in total, whereas storage voltage is about 3.85 and full is 4.2 V. I have no idea.
Now if you can find a battery, you have a new camera to play with. :)
The nominal battery voltage is the median or average I believe, so it correctly shows half battery capacity. Lowest for two cells would be around 6 V. Similar with 1.2 V NiCd/MH cells or 2 V Pb cell, the working voltage will be usually higher. I think it's also marked in this way to easily calculate the battery capacity in Wh from the nominal voltage.
It's always safer to set the nominal value like in this case.
30:33 the part mounted on an angle is a Piezoelectric shock-sensor, you will find one or two of these on a harddrive too. What it's used for in a camera with no hard disk, is the question!
Great video! Us Australian CZcamsrs should team up ;) Here's my take on the digital cameras of yester-year.
[Remember Ep. 2] The Story Of The Digital Camera
I have a MVC-FD71 With box and all paperwork! lol I also have two 1 gallon zip lock bags full of 3.5 floppy's. I now have no way to view the pics except the camera. Thank God it still works! :)
Modern 2014 compact cameras still use mirrors to bend the image 90 degrees. Any compact camera that doesn't have an extending lens typically will be using a mirror system.
Man it definately doesn't seem like it was that long ago, but the difference inthe tech is quite astounding.
Nice job, Dave!
Great videography (esp. the macro segment with sensor), editing (video is just the right length ... not a lot of rambling), and gentle deconstruction (would be neat to be able to still use it ... or eBay it ... etc.).
Would be cool to have look at the image files that were captured....
I think I remember an add on product that looked like a floppy disk with a serial cable coming off of it. You put the floppy device in the drive and plug the serial cable in a serial port on a computer. With the software your computer would act as the floppy disk.
My dad used one of these for his work back in 1998. (forensics) It could store something like 20-25 photos per disk from what I remember. (nearly as good as a film roll but cheaper)
He used to have tons of disks everywhere!
My dad used on of these cameras back in the day.
Nice video. I ve got a full generation of these camera's and all still work well. The Macro lens was amazing. Made a couple of vids showing them working. Sony Mavica Floppy Disc. FD7,FD73,FD83 (Part1)
Love the teardown.
The first mavica using floppys was the FD5, the FD7 was released the same year but a bit later.
I had a Mavica FD75 back in the day. When I had mine (early 2000s) there were other media types available in other cameras but the floppy was still awesome because the disks cost practically nothing: at the time you probably had stacks of them handy.
You had to fork over big bucks to get other storage media types, so you wouldn't want to buy a bunch unless you were a pro, and it would suck to lose one. Floppies, you throw a bunch in your bag, fill 'em up, read them easily and start again the next day.
Dave, Sony nex-5t isn't DSLR. It's mirrorless. DSLR would be thicker due to the mirror inside, and almost comparable to the thickness of Mavica.
Yes, it's an EVIL camera, or whatever you want to call it, but DSLR is still a common generic name.
Still it's strange to differentiate camera by lack of feature - mirrorless. Why not call the pocket cameras viewfinderless?
Jan Tichavský
Because some "pocket cameras" do have viewfinders.
Haha - I remember getting one of these at work around 98-99 from memory. Was frustrating to use with the floppy disk with its limited capacity. You could only get a dozen or so photos on each floppy. It was quickly ousted as other, more practical, digital cameras took off quickly.
That's very ironic. The floppy drive in this camera is a Mitsumi brand. However Sony invented the 3½" floppy drive an discs and made the original ones that I believe were in the first Macintosh.
I actually found two of these in a box of misc. crap at a local auction held by the local lions club, i seem to remember tearing one of them down as well, i still cant get over how huge they are
The screen update frame rate is pretty amazing. Some current cameras are even slower than that (mostly because of crappy optics, long shutter and slow cpu for processing very high resolution images).
I also have a Sony Mavica FD5 and an FD90. Both are in very good condition and I still use them from time to time. I also have a Sony MaviCap FDR3E portable floppy disk-drive with inbuilt screen. This is also a very cool item ;)
Got one of those floppy cameras aswell! It's great, and the battery life is still pretty good :D
Just checked, it's a MVC-FD81, it can shoot 5-sec videos... Groundbreaking!
Dave, did you notice when you were "recording" the photo to disk, the voltage dropped on the psu display, so you must have exceeded your 1amp limit when the floppy disk motor was spinning up. This probably caused it to be slightly artificially slow
I actually used one of those cameras in 1999, from memory it took a few seconds for the camera to save the image to floppy diskette, and of course as the camera saved the image, you'd hear that familiar sound of the drive writing to the diskette. I believe my family's babysitter also had one of these cameras, a science teacher at my school had one too and I remember reading about them in Electronics Australia. These cameras were very unique for the time. I think Sony had a later model that could even record short video clips to diskette.
I remember my primary school had one of these back in 1998. I was in year 6 at the time and all the computers were being upgraded to Windows 95/98.
I loved my floppy drive digital camera. I literally used it to death. Battery life was terrible but with a bit of concious powr saving and a whole stack of floppy disks you really could make a humongous amount of pictures for the day.
I remember my dad having a camera for work very similar like this around that time period when it was produced, might have even been the same model. It was great playing around with this as a kid, pretty amazing back then. Any chance we could see the images you shot?
my dad used one of these cameras to take some pictures of our fish way back in 1998 when that camera was still fresh. im surprised that theres some of these left
Just imagine that sweet sound of an image capture! Ka-chuuga-chuuga-wikk-wikk-chuuga from the floppy disk. That's something I miss from those days - our electronics making sounds - other that CD-roms spinning up.
And if you ever used a floppy disk camera, the feeling of the head moving around inside of the camera and being transmitted to the palm of your hand is pure heaven.
I think you’ll find as well that a lot of slim line cameras with optical zoom run with a very similar mirrored setups, even today.
By the year 2000 Floppy Disc technology was just about obsolete so these cameras were never designed to be a long term solution.
Had one! And it got stolen, sadly.. And technically, I never had one, it was my dad's! Anyway, I figure it must have a regular Sony video CCD, as the pictures are interlaced! Also, there was actually a floppy to memory stick adapter for it, although that was very hard to find. Great device though!
I was given one of these, used, around 2000-2001. I loved taking pictures with it, but there was a problem with either the floppy drive or the drive controller itself. The camera refused to recognize any previously formatted 1.44MB IBM diskettes, unless they were formatted by the camera. The diskettes still retained 1.44MB capacity using the IBM format but, I suspect, it borked the file system. The disks worked flawlessly on the camera, but whenever I tried to use them in a PC, files were randomly unreadable.
The camera's drive probably had misaligned heads.
I laughed out loud when I saw how long it took to write to the floppy. Such nostalgia!
I got a couple of old Mavica cameras, a MVC-FD81 an a MVC-FD200 that I use as my main camera