Quality at a CHEAP price!!! (Sony Mavica MVC-FD88)

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Product:	Sony Mavica MVC-FD88
Date:	12/01/01 (519 review reads)
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If you?re thinking of investing in a digital camera then this is well worth a read.
The Mavica FD-88 is a tiny, stylish and altogether superb camera, which comes at reasonable price especially when you consider all the features. And of course knowing my taste I?m sure you?ll all love it!!! (ha ha)

So why did I buy this camera
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Well I was looking for a reasonably cheap digital camera (one that uses floppy disks). There was a range of reasons from wanting to take pictures at weddings and never running out of film to having a laugh and editing the pictures. So once I?d decided that it was definitely a digital camera that I needed I started to do some research. That paid off and know I?ve got a ?state of the art? digital camera!

The Mavica FD-88 was recommend to me by a friend and I took up his advice and bought the camera. So I?d like to do the same, so here it is my opinion on the Mavica FD-88.

Weight
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This comes in at a mere ten ounces give or take an ounce, so it's not an excessive burden to carry around or hold up for long periods of time. This digital camera is compatible with a tripod which is useful especially if you haven?t got steady hands or want to take lots of pictures.

One of my favourite parts of the camera is the strap, surprisingly enough. Because, it is soft, firm and of a reasonable length. This along with the fact that at a click of a button you can close the lens, no more loosing it, hooray!!!

Zoom
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I?ve always loved zooming in and out with a camera so this was paradise. The Mavica FD-88 supports 8x optical zoom and 16x digital zoom. What's the difference? Well, you can either manually manipulate the camera to zoom in 8x at a reasonable quality and resolution, or you can let the camera do the math for you and zoom in up to 16x at a resolution and quality that may not be to your liking. Usually I just let the camera do everything it
s much easier!!!


Display and Functions
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At the back of the camera is a display screen. It is roughly 2x2 inches squared. Another classy feature of this camera is that you can adjust the contrast, brightness level and back-light intensity for power conservation or the ability to see the display on a bright sunny day. Which has already come in very useful (once ? we all know about British weather)!!!

The display is an excellent indicator of light levels and it will let you know if it is going to fire off a flash. Furthermore you can delete and re-shoot images until you've got the light levels just right on the image instead of burning through expensive film. No more messing up the film and feeling guilty about wasting a picture!!!

The controls are accessed by a few buttons with very clear labels and then a thumb-pivot button that can set the time, turn on or off the beeping, format diskettes, set the resolution and image quality/size, and other on-screen menu features. After a few tries, I found it fairly easy to use.

The alternative for film?
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Oh the joy of not having to change film, take it to be printed and pay out large sums of money!!! Well as you?ve probably gathered there's no film in it, none, zip, zero, zilch!!!. It saves the images that you take a standard formatted computer floppy disk, which you can pop out and stick in a computer to read, download, manipulate, print, or send over e-mail. The only hold back is that you need a computer, but if you?re reading this then I guess you have!! It?s a lot easier than messing with cables and adapters or swapping tiny cards that can be lost easily. As many digital camera?s these days require you to. It can hold between 15 and 25 standard resolution (640x480) pictures and size images on a single floppy in the widely-used JPEG image standard. If you want to get into higher resolutions and greater detail, you'll have
to knock the capacity down to as little as four images at the highest quality and resolution (1280x960). You will get great quality pictures but you need a lot of floppy disks!!! Up to 1.3 mega-pixels, according to the information booklet, which gives a near-film quality to images. There's an on-screen indicator of how much disk space you have left on each floppy so that you know when it's time to swap floppies or scale back on size. Another great function of this camera and all digital camera?s is that you can flick through the photographs that you?ve taken. Hence being able to see if any of them are not worthy of your photo-book.

Diskettes are cheap and easy to use, but the biggest drawback to this camera is that you're limited to those as your storage media. There's no cable inputs or outputs for other kinds of media like Sony's new smart cards besides a simple video output jack for when you want to pump the video into a recording unit or something like that. You also end up having to make sure all the disks are formatted and labelled and keeping them all straight after you use them. Believe me when I say that there is nothing more frustrating then popping in a disk and realising it's already full. One further thing that you have to remember is that its useful to have a disk case so the disks don?t get scratched and ruined.

The camera can format the diskettes with a few buttons and commands, but that ends up using a trickle of power each time so battery-misers may want to pre-format everything before going out on a shoot. Just plan on bringing a bunch of floppies or tossing them to your buddy or assistant to put in the bin for later retrieval and storage.

With the standard 1.44MB size limit for each disk, you're not going to be able to make a major production out of any MPEG movie clips you take with this thing. The movie function is not particularly good probably because the memory is quite small and these
take up a lot of space. So the function is useful when you want to take a quick clip of a once in a life time occurrence, (Not many of those). Work on the assumption that you get 15 seconds maximum at 320x240 resolution, and 15 frames per second. This isn?t a lot of time and the image won?t be outstanding so I don?t recommend that you take films, stick with pictures.


Battery Power
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The Sony Mavica FD-88, with its rechargeable battery pack, alleviates this fear and desperate need. You should be able to get roughly 60 to 70 minutes of usage out of this camera. That?s including formatting and a little bit of fiddling around with the functions. Using the flash does add little bit of an additional drain, and the camera will give you a very good indicator in terms of minutes of power on the display. The shutdown mode has about a three- or four-second wake-up time, which is pretty decent when considering this thing doesn't have a true sleep mode in it.

When you wish to have a look what you?re pictures look like in big size, all you have to do is take out the floppy disk and put it into your computer. This takes up NO battery power, hooray!!!

The battery has to be recharged externally, though, and it won't run on an A/C adapter so you can always purchase a spare and have it at the ready for your very long shoots or movie-clip making ventures.

Effects
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There's some basic effects this camera can do to your images: black and white and a sepia tone (which means nothing to me). You also have some built-in programs that make it easier to shoot with images in the background. However, yet again I?m sticking with the basics, and I doubt I?ll need those extra functions.

Size
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The camera is fairly large size-wise, about six inches square and doesn't really fit naturally in my hands like my camera but then again my old camera ran out of film after about 10 photos (slight ex
aggeration). What I liked about the Mavica FD-88, is that it is possible to get a good grip on it and sight with the screen on the back-panel and reach both the shutter and the zoom feature with a little practice. A bit of a mouthful but it had to be said.

Cost
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Well this is the part that you?ll be dreading to read so brace yourself. I would recommend you look around before purchasing because you can sometimes pick up a deal. I went over to the USA and got mine for about $800, but they cost about £800 here so I got a good deal.

Conclusion
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So if you?re looking for something simple to use, that has a very basic movie clip feature, that packs a lot of power when it comes to image quality and battery life then this camera is meant for you. Before purchasing look at the whole Sony Mavica range.

Any comments on this opinion, or on the Mavica FD-88 are welcomed (as usual). Cheers for taking the time to read this!!!

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