From a users viewpoint (Sony Mavica MVC-FD90)

Member Name: SusanLesley

Product:	Sony Mavica MVC-FD90
Date:	20/10/01 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good pictures, Ease of download, Easy to use

Disadvantages: A bit expensive

There was request on one of the ‘gropes’ (Yahoo groups) the other day for opinions about digital cameras and it got me thinking. Everyone doing opinions of this type would, naturally enough, veer towards the technical capabilities of the item in question, in fact Dave (partyspice) has already done an excellent opinion about this very camera and received a crown for it so I’m not about to try and compete!

I thought that I would try writing an opinion from the users point of view about the benefits of having such a camera, without going into the technical side, which I don’t really understand anyway, and see how it was received.

Our new camera is a Sony Digital Mavica (or MVC-FD90) and it cost us about £450. Mind you we had saved over £100 worth of free vouchers on sites such as Mypoints and Ipoints, which helped a lot, and we got 9 months interest free credit on the remainder of the price.

When we first decided to buy a digital camera we did our research by having a good look round at what was available and where the best prices were, and of course reading opinions!

The reasons we went for this camera, apart from the technical stuff, which is Dave’s forte, are as follows:

The camera takes a standard floppy disk, so the pictures are easy to load directly from the disk onto the computer.

The camera has a decent zoom lens – always an advantage especially with my eyesight!

The camera itself is a decent size, obviously since it contains a floppy disk. This means that the screen on the back of the camera for viewing the pictures taken is big enough for me to see.

Now I’ll tell you a bit about the benefits of having a digital camera, as I confess I was a bit unsure about spending that sort of money on yet another camera when Dave first suggested it!

As some of you know I make and sell baby clothes, particularly shawls, and Dave is making a web site for
me so the camera has come in very useful for taking the photographs needed. Before we had this camera we had to take the photographs with an ‘ordinary’ camera and then wait until they were developed before we could see whether they would be any good – and of course there was all the messing about with scanning.

With this camera Dave can take the photograph and check straight away if its good enough and, if not, delete and try again. Loading the photographs from the floppy disk to the computer is much simpler than messing about with the scanner too!

The idea of being able to check the photographs straight away of course extends to any that we take. We all know how annoying it is when the film comes back from the developers and there are photographs of people with their eyes closed or with trees seemingly growing out of their heads!

We have recently found another great use for the camera too. Dave has recently started a new job as a consultant and has to travel to various parts of the UK. I am interested to know what the hotel is like and what his room is like etc., so…

He takes the camera with him and takes photographs of various things to show me when he gets home and after I’ve seen them he can just clear the disk and use it again.

This will be useful in many different situations. Often I see something that I wouldn’t want to waste film taking a photograph of but I do think, for example, ‘I wish mom could see that!’ The other big advantage is that, as I said before, we don’t have to wait to finish the film and get it developed, and we don’t have to keep the photograph after it has been shown.

Anyway that’s my opinion of our new camera, I hope it’s been of use to you.

Please leave me a comment to let me know whether this is the type of opinion that IS useful to you or whether I would be better leaving it to the people who are able
to write the technical stuff.

Summary: