Bargain Basement Shootout

If the end of the beginning for serious digital photography was the 1999 launch of the Nikon D1, the first all in-house digital single lens reflex camera from one of the Big Two Japanese camera makers, then the beginning of the end for film SLRs was in 2003. It was triggered by a digital SLR price war caused by Canon's launch of the EOS 300D.

Known in the U.S. as the Digital Rebel, the 300D sported the 7-point autofocus system and 6.1MP sensor like that on Canon's semi-pro EOS 10D, but where the 10D sold as a body only for a $1,999 MSRP, the Rebel could be had for $999 complete with an 18-55mm zoom lens.

How was this done? Well, firstly some features were deleted (and some disabled). Also, the bright, but heavy and expensive, glass pentaprism viewfinder was replaced with a lighter, dimmer, cheaper pentamirror. Finally, the rugged magnesium shell of the 10D got binned in exchange for a thinner plastic body.

The launch of the Digital Rebel brought DSLR cameras in range of the casual photographer and kicked off a price war between Nikon and Canon that reached its apogee... or perigee? ...in 2008-2009, the years that arguably saw the final maturing of the DSLR market. Since then changes in DSLR cameras have been mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

The five years between the introduction of the Rebel and '08-'09 saw furious competition between Nikon and Canon as each tried to grab a bigger share of the entry-level DSLR market by packing ever-cheaper beginner cameras with ever-better features until something had to give.

So Canon and Nikon each peeled off an even cheaper model to serve as an enticing price leader in boxed kits sold in big box stores, leaving the original entry model to continue accruing more advanced features without as much of an eye toward absolute minimum MSRP.

Canon followed the original 300D/Rebel with the 350D/Rebel XT (8MP, same $999 kit price), then the 400D/Rebel XTi (10MP, $899 kit), and then the 450D/Rebel XSi (12MP, $899 kit). Then in 2008, while the Rebel XSi was still fresh on the market, Canon slid an entirely new camera beneath it in the lineup: The Rebel XS, called the 1000D overseas; in Canon's numerical marketing, the fewer the digits, the higher-zoot the camera, with the ultimate pro DSLR body being the 1D series.

Relative to the Rebel XSi, the Rebel XS lost the "i" suffix, as well as a handful of features. It recycled the 10MP sensor from the XTi, and the 7-point autofocus system from the XT. While the XSi had moved to a higher resolution 3" rear LCD display, the XS used the same 2.5" screen as the XTi. These and other shortcuts allowed Canon to drop the price of the basic kit with an 18-55mm zoom lens to only $699, a price point starting to put the squeeze on higher end point-'n'-shoot "bridge cameras".

From this point on, Canon designated their better US-market Rebels with a "T" prefix and an "i" suffix: T1i, T2i, et cetera. The cheaper entry-level models lost the "i", like the T3 below.

Canon didn't iterate these bargain-bin models as frequently, so the 2011 T3 is the direct successor to the XS. It picked up the 12MP sensor and 9-point autofocus system from the XSi, the DIGIC 4 processor (then-current across the Canon DSLR line, but long in the tooth and about to be replaced in the higher-end models), and added the ability to shoot 720p video.

So in 2011 the customer who went looking for a DSLR at Best Buy or in the camera aisle at Walmart or Target (hard to believe now that just ten years ago Wally World and Tahr-jay had a whole aisle of cameras) had their choice of two boxed Canon kits: the 18MP T3i with an 18-55mm lens for $899, or the 12MP T3 with the same lens for only $599.

The price-conscious shopper wasn't going to care about details like a body shell of smoother, thinner plastic, the lack of a separate door for the memory card (it shared the compartment on the bottom with the battery, which was cheaper, but precluded swapping cards while mounted on a tripod), or the fact that the T3 was built in Taiwan rather than Japan. The T3i also had a bigger, articulated LCD screen on the back, the ability to shoot 1080p HD video, and other details... but three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks.

In 2009, Canon's biggest competitor reorganized their entry level line as well. The big box store DSLR shopper would find a pair of kits from Nikon: There was the D5000, which competed head-to head with Canon's T1i. It had 12MP, an articulated LCD, could shoot 720P video, and came with an 18-55mm lens for $850.

Competing with the cheaper Canon Rebel XS was the new Nikon D3000. It was extremely stripped down relative to the D5000, and much smaller. It lacked video recording and an articulated screen, but this wee little DSLR came with a wee little price tag; with the kit lens included, the tariff was only $449. 

Essentially, Nikon was using the 10MP CCD sensor and 11-point autofocus sensor from its old D200 semi-professional camera, hooked to the new EXPEED processor.

The D3000 had a built-in tutoring "Guide Mode" for novices, and had a minimum set of physical controls, with fewer buttons and most settings controlled via a menu on the rear LCD screen.

Comparing the extreme entry-level cameras from the two companies (and it's a generalized comparison as the T3 is an iteration newer than the D3000), the Nikon feels more solid in the hands. It combines beginner friendliness in its minimal buttons and "Guide Mode" with features of more expensive cameras that the budget Canon lacks, like the soft textured rubber on the handgrip and the separate side-mounted door for the memory card. The viewfinder on the Nikon is noticeably brighter, although that's relative; both are cramped and dim compared to the pentaprism finders on pro cameras.

The kit lenses both have pretty much identical specs, including "VR" Vibration Reduction on the Nikon and "IS" Image Stabilization on the Canon, as well as the same range of focal lengths and apertures, and are (other than the lens elements themselves) constructed of plastic from the filter ring to the mounting flange. However the Nikkor AF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR feels much more upmarket compared to its rival; once mounted on the camera where you can't see its plastic flange, you could be forgiven for thinking it cost a good bit more than it did, while Canon's EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II never stops letting you know it came in the box with the camera like a prize with some Cracker Jacks. 

Literally the only place the Nikon feels chintzier is in the diopter adjustment for the viewfinder, which is a fiddly sliding bar arrangement instead of the normal dial on the Rebel T3.

When I'm done with this DSLR project, I'm going to sell or give away the Rebel T3, but I'm keeping the Nikon D3000. When you get done with Guide Mode and don't need the beginner's training wheels, you can do like I did and go into the menus and switch the status display on the rear LCD screen from its cartoon-like simplified graphic look to the normal white-on-black status display other Nikons use. While in the menu you can also correct the only real physical control shortcoming by reassigning the "Fn" function button on the front of the camera, which comes from the factory set to start the self-timer, and switch it to be the ISO control button.

The basic 10MP CCD and 11-point CAM-1000 autofocus core of the D3000 is still plenty for solid work; after all, it's the same guts as the Nikon D200 I used as my main camera for years, just in a smaller and lighter package.

These entry level cameras were key to Canon & Nikon's marketing plans for over a dozen years, intended to bring in new buyers and entice them to move up inside their respective manufacturer's ecosystems to bigger and better things. The Nikon entices you by feeling like a real camera, while the Canon makes you maybe wish you'd spent the extra money for the next level camera from the start...or maybe bought the Nikon in the showcase next to it.

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Random Old Camera Notes

One thing about using older cameras is that even if the camera is sold as "includes battery and charger", that doesn't necessarily mean the battery is worth a damn. 

The original Canon Digital Rebel I gave Bobbi six or seven years ago has spent most of the intervening years sitting on a shelf on her desk behind her computer monitor. Over that time, the BP511 battery pack in it has quietly gone (mostly) toes up. You can power up the camera, it shows a full charge, and by the time you've set the date and time and taken a single photo, it's down to one bar on the little segmented battery icon. 

The irony is that this is the battery pack on which someone had scrawled "NEW" on in Sharpie at sometime in the past. The EN-EL4 that came with my Nikon D2X was in the same shape. Being fair, these batteries are probably at least a dozen years old. Fortunately, both are still in production and available thanks to huge installed user bases. Canon used the BP511 and BP511a in probably a dozen models, up to 2010 or so, and the EN-EL4 and -EL4a powered Nikon's top-of-the-line pro bodies for eight years, as well as its final film camera, the F6.

I've also noted that the original Digital Rebel is wonky when writing RAW files even if you don't turn it off in the middle of the process. It seems to do fine with JPEGs, though.

SOOC large, fine JPEG

The thing with a digicam like this is that it's entered its disposable days. Use it, have fun, but don't plan on repairing it or anything when it finally grinds to a halt. In perfect working order and top-notch cosmetic condition, this is a fifty dollar camera body. In the shape this one's in cosmetically, its real street value couldn't buy lunch for two at Chick-fil-A.

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Black Friday

KEH Camera Brokers is having a site-wide 10% off sale for Black Friday, the discount code is BF21E.

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Time Capsule

Check out this Best Buy sales circular from 1996!

Remember when games for your PC came in a box and didn't require an internet connection to play? Good times.

(It was a good thing, too, because it'd take forever to download a couple CD-ROM's worth of data at 28.8 kbps...)

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Writing Time

So, if you're out shooting with an original EOS Digital Rebel, a creaky silver plastic 300D, and it has only, like one bar of battery left so you're turning it off after each shot to conserve juice...you should probably remember to wait for a solid five- or six-Mississippi to flick the switch to "OFF" because it takes that thing FOREVER to write a RAW file and if you turn it off in the middle of the save process it just corrupts the data.

Just throwing that out there. No particular reason.

Have a colorful photo shot in RAW...after I noticed that glitch.

That was shot in RAW and processed in Adobe Photoshop Bridge, just hitting "Adobe Vivid" and the "Auto" correction button.

For contrast, I switched the camera over to the Large Fine JPEG setting and shot the same scene...

It only takes about two seconds to record the highest quality JPEG, since it only takes up a little over 2MB on the card rather than the 6.6MB of a RAW file.

These days it's easy to forget that in the early days of higher-resolution digital photography, recording speed was a limiting factor; so much of one that Digital Photography Review measured how long it took to write files to the card.

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Question Answered?

So a couple posts ago we asked this question regarding the Nikon D1X:

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still?

Personally, I think the answer is "Yes".

As you near the six megapixel mark, you're getting resolution equal to or better than all but the best 35mm films.

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Walking on its Fins

If you pick up a DSLR from, say, about 2005 or 2006, and one made this year, you'll find surprisingly few major differences in the way they operate. Sure, there are a few more buttons on the newer camera for things like Live View and other features that weren't present in the older camera, but the labeling conventions and such had been pretty well worked out by Dubya's second term.

Not so much with one made in 2001. They were still kinda winging it.

Looking at the front or top of a 2001 Nikon D1X, it would seem that the controls had already been figured out by then, but that's because those controls don't really differ from those of a Nikon film SLR. A Nikon F5 or N80 user would feel right at home. 

The little focus mode selector dial (Manual, Single-servo, Continuous-servo) is right there next to the lens mount where it can be operated by the left hand, on the opposite side of the mount is the depth-of-field preview button. The sub-command dial is on the top front of the handgrip, just below the power switch and shutter release, waiting for your index finger. The three position metering selector switch (3D Matrix metering, Center-weighted, Spot) is on the side of the pentaprism housing, with a lock button, just like on the F5.

It's when we get to the back of the camera and start running into digital-specific controls that things seem weird to our modern conventions.

The button labeled "MONITOR" at the top left is still there on newer Nikons...in the same place, and performing the same function...but it now has the more familiar "play" arrow-in-a-rectangle icon.

The monitor screen is tiny. Under that rubber DIGITAL I/O flap is an IEEE 1394 Firewire connector. Very 2001.

Buttons for white balance, and various menu controls are rubber chiclets hidden under a little magnetically-latched fold-down trap door, emulating the placement of some of the more obscure controls on the F5. In succeeding versions of Nikon's pro DSLR bodies, these would migrate out to normal buttons on the back of the camera and the trap door would go away.

The weirdest thing about the D1X is how it gets its high (for the era) resolution.

The bottleneck at the time was processing all the data from the sensor and getting it written to memory. So with the D1X, Nikon kept the number of horizontal rows the same as on the original D1's sensor (1324) but went to 4028 vertical columns*. Since the sensor data is read row-by-row, this allowed a maximum frame rate of 3fps to be maintained. 

The buffer still fills up in six shots when shooting at that speed, giving you a quick two-Mississippi of continuous shooting before you have to sit and wait for it to write everything to the card. This is not a camera for spray-and-pray action photography.

The downside to the weird sensor arrangement is that the NEF files may not be understandable to some newer 3rd party RAW converters from smaller companies. Adobe Photoshop Bridge still supports them, of course.

By comparison to some of the weirder features of the D1X, its replacement is utterly conventional.

*You can see how this works on the first page of DPReview's original D1X review.

The Deal With DX

When Nikon launched the original D1 in 1999, the big attraction was that it would seamlessly use any existing F-mount lenses a photographer already had. For a pro photographer, the biggest investment is in the glass.

During the autofocus revolution of the Eighties and Nineties, when Minolta and Canon left existing users behind by adopting entirely new mounts, Nikon stubbornly engineered an autofocus system that would allow the new cameras to retain backwards compatibility with older manual-focus lenses. With the transition to digital, they retained that same lens mount.

The thing is, CCD sensor technology was obscenely expensive. Elsewhere I looked at Canon's 1D, with an APS-H sensor, and its 1Ds, with a full frame 35mm sensor, and the price difference between these two otherwise very similar cameras:

To give an idea of how much the price of the sensor affected the price of the camera, the APS-H 4MP EOS 1D dropped in 2001 for $6500, and a year later the full frame 11MP EOS 1Ds joined it in Canon's lineup for a whopping eight grand. That's better than $200/MP or, looked at another way, seven dollars per square millimeter of additional sensor size. At seven bucks a square millimeter, the head of a pin would be $28 and a penny would be almost two grand.

Nikon went with a sensor size called "APS-C", which has 1/3rd less field of view than a standard 35mm negative, but is close enough to it in size to still be able to functionally use Nikon's existing library of F-mount lenses, although the practical result would be to give them a 1.5x focal length modifier.

For instance, I spent a day wandering around with a 35-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens on the D1X. On a regular Nikon film SLR, this was a common enough walkabout lens in the Nineties; it covered a useful range of focal lengths from a wide-ish angle for street photography to a short telephoto for portraiture.

On the smaller sensor of the D1X, it was effectively a 53-158mm lens, however.

What does this mean in real life? Well, I saw this yellow house with an orange tree in the front yard and thought it was so colorful in the afternoon light that it warranted a picture...but there was literally no way to get it all in frame like I could have if it had been on a full frame camera, even by taking a step into the neighbor's lawn across the street.

It wouldn't be until 2003 that Nikon introduced lenses specifically designed to work with APS-C sized sensors, which Nikon called "DX". Where a typical all-in-one Nikon zoom for the film era had been a 24-120mm, the DX equivalent was a 16-80mm.

So, while a pro photog in 2001 who'd been using the F5 35mm film camera on the left could theoretically transition straight over to the D1X with all his kit*, he'd suddenly find himself short of wide angle lenses (but blessed with an abundance of super telephotos.)

*And the D1X is a camera that marked a lot of pros seriously transitioning. The original 2.7MP D1 was fine for newspaper photography, but the 5.7MP D1X could pretty much print anywhere 35mm film was used.

The current fossil...

I thought I was going to be reviewing the Sony Mavica MVC-CD300 next, but it looks like I'm spared having to drag out my cheap little USB-powered CD-ROM drive for a while longer.

I'm trying to move forward through time based on when the cameras were announced, using Digital Photography Review's camera database as the guide. According to it, the CD300 was announced near the end of February 2001, while the Nikon D1X was announced earlier that month, so the Nikon it is.

The serial number on my D1X, which I bought well-used back in 2015, marks it as one of the first 500 to leave Nikon's factory. It was already quite obsolete in 2015 and by 2021 standards, it's downright quirky.

But can a 5.3 megapixel CCD sensor take good photos still? Let's find out!

Bridge to the Future

In the year 2000 a professional photographer who needed to go digital needed to shell out ten grand for a Kodak DCS system or five grand for the Nikon D1, both of which had less than three megapixels, but were compatible with all their existing Nikon lenses. If they were a Canon shooter, they were in luck because late that year Canon launched their entirely in-house D30, which had a 3MP APS-C sized CMOS sensor and could use the existing array of EF-mount EOS system lenses. Not as ruggedly professional as the Nikon-based offerings, it was still a $3,000 purchase; a lot of dough for someone not planning on earning at least a little bit of money with it.

Hence cameras like the Coolpix 990, which not only sported a 3.34MP sensor, but also allowed an enthusiast photographer to exert almost SLR-levels of control, all for $900.

The rotating power switch surrounding the shutter release button atop the handgrip would be familiar to the user of Nikon's then-current lineup of film SLRs.

The switch can be rotated from "OFF" to one of two "REC" settings, "A" for Automatic and "M" for Manual, as well as Play, which is used to review images and videos that have been recorded on the card. The three different settings also control what comes up on the screen when the Menu button on the camera's back is pressed.

In "A" mode, the camera does most of the work for you and there's not really any way to override much of anything. Toggle over to "M" and pretty much everything's up for grabs. You can shoot in Program Exposure, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or full Manual modes just like a Nikon SLR, with the Command Dial aft of the shutter release performing the same functions. The LCD display on the top of the camera displays pertinent shooting info, again just like on an F100 or F5 film SLR.

On the rear of the camera, above the small LCD monitor, are buttons to toggle the monitor through various levels of information displayed or turn it off altogether, the Menu button, and the rocker switch for powering the zoom lens between wide angle and telephoto settings. The lens has a focal length range equivalent to 38-115mm on a full-frame camera, and is reasonably fast, with maximum aperture ranging between f/2.5 and f/4 depending on the focal length selected.

To the right of the LCD monitor is a four-way directional controller for toggling between menu settings and selecting between the five autofocus points. 

Below that is a row of three buttons that each serve two functions, depending on how they're used. The first can be used to toggle through settings for Landscape, Macro, and Self-Timer (the Macro is very useful, with a minimum close focus distance of only two centimeters.) In manual focus mode, this button is held down while rotating the Command Dial to focus. There's no focus assistance on the monitor, so the shooter needs to know the approximate distance to the subject to select the correct focusing range from fifty preset distances, 0.02M to INF.

The middle button toggles through flash modes (Auto, Off, Redeye Reduction, Fill Flash, and Slow Synch), and is used in combination with the Command Dial to adjust ISO settings. The Coolpix 990 can shoot at 100, 200, 400, or be left in Auto to select among the three for itself.

The rightmost button selects picture size and quality. Size is selected by holding the button down and rotating the Command Dial to choose between Full (2048x1536), XGA (1024x768), VGA (640x480) and a 3:2 setting to imitate the aspect ratio of a classic film negative (2048x1360). Quality is toggled by pressing the button through three different levels of JPEG compression (BASIC, NORMAL, and FINE) as well as HI quality, which saves an uncompressed TIFF. The manual is careful to point out that you'll only get one HI quality 2048x1536 TIFF on a 16MB Compact Flash card.

2048x1536 resolution, FINE compression,  ISO 400

The CF card door is on the right-hand side of the camera body and is made of thin plastic, made to feel flimsy by comparison to the general solidity of the 990's magnesium housing. Above the CF hatch is a rubberized cover over Video Out and USB/serial digital I/O ports.

On the bottom of the camera is the battery door, located close enough to the tripod socket that you aren't going to change batteries while the camera's mounted on one. The latch is a weak spot, and broke on the first Coolpix 990 I had, the one I got from Oleg. Then again, that was after a good six years of yeoman service, and Oleg reports that it's since been repaired and the camera's working fine.

The Coolpix 990 runs on four AA batteries. It's a mixed blessing, in that a set of four alkalines will be exhausted in a couple hours of shooting, especially if one is profligate with the monitor usage or leaves the camera's focus setting in Continuous mode (unlikely, as the constant whirring and chortling of the focus motor will drive the user up the wall long before the batteries fail.) But on the other hand, replacement batteries are sold...and cheaply...in every corner store; it's not like you need to remember to bring charged spares from home.

With its 3.34MP resolution and SLR-like controllability, the Coolpix 990 was a breakthrough camera. Photographer Oleg Volk used one before taking the DSLR plunge with a Canon D30. Kevin Creighton mentioned that they used 990s to supplement the hyper expensive Phase Onedigital backs they shot fashion catalogs with in the same way that Polaroids were used to supplement medium and large format studio film cameras. 2048x1536 was enough to make even diehard film shooters think that there might be something to this digital fad.

While 1999 and 2000 were the years marking the introduction of the first serious digital cameras, it's worth noting that they also marked the beginning of the end of the last generation of new film cameras. After 2000 you could count the number of film SLRs that would be released by Canon and Nikon combined without having to pull off both mittens.

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New Millennium's Resolution!

The last camera we looked at here at Digital Fossils was the 1999-vintage Sony Mavica FD-88. One of those had been my first digital camera, bought at a Knoxville, Tennessee Walmart as discounted New Old Stock in October of 2001. I used it for a couple years before getting a hand-me-down Nikon Coolpix 990 from Oleg Volk.

The Coolpix 990 was announced in January of 2000 by Nikon, heralding the new millennium with a 3.34 megapixel sensor.

Interestingly, the 3.34MP 1/1.8" CCD sensor was manufactured by Sony, who would use it in their own Cyber-shot DSC-S70, released later that same year, and sell it to other camera manufacturers as well, such as Olympus, who used it as the centerpiece of their Camedia C-3030 Zoom. Both Sony and Olympus marked their cameras with "3.3 Megapixel" badges, but Nikon wrung every kilopixel out of the 990's marketing, emblazoning the front of the Coolpix's body with a sticker reading "3.34 Megapixels".

Not only was this new 3.3MP sensor higher in resolution than the 1.2MP sensor in the '99-vintage Mavica, it was physically larger, measuring almost 9mm diagonally versus the 6mm diagonal CCD in the Sony.

While it was labeled a 1/1.8" sensor, this didn't correspond to any actual physical dimension, but was a holdover from analog video tube days. Despite having a bigger, higher resolution sensor, the Coolpix 990 boasted an MSRP a hundred dollars less than the Mavica FD-88; Moore's law was marching on.

Powered down, the Coolpix 990 was about the size and shape of a modern compact crop-sensor DSLR body.

It featured a body style that had begun with the original 1MP Coolpix 900 of 1998 and 1999's 2MP Coolpix 950. The controls and LCD monitor were all in the side of the body that had the handgrip. The lens and optical viewfinder were in the other half of the body, and it...pivoted!

The lens assembly could be rotated through more than 180 degrees. You could hold it in front of your face and use the optical viewfinder, or you could shoot using the screen for live view and hold it over your head or at waist level or wherever you needed by twisting the grip. After the demise of these two-piece Coolpix models, this feature would be missed until tilting or articulated LCD screens started becoming commonplace again a decade or more later.

The construction was rugged, with a magnesium body shell that gave a solid feeling.

Most of all, that 3.34MP sensor was about as high-res as you could get in 2000AD, equaling that of Canon's first all in-house DSLR, the 3MP D30, which cost three grand for the body alone, lens not included.

What does 3.34MP look like? About like this...

How is 640,000 like 6,600,000?

Everyone knows about the infamous Bill Gates quote:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

While there's no evidence he actually said it, and in fact he strenuously denies it, it's gone down in geek pop culture as an example of failing to anticipate future tech expansion.

While reading up for the next camera review, I ran across a similarly-flavored quote from 2000, but this one's still right there in plain text on the original website.

In his review of the slick new Nikon Coolpix 990, Phil Askey wrote

"In my personal opinion we'll reach a maximum pixel count, a level at which pro-sumers (those willing to spend upward of $1000 on a digital camera) will have enough pixels (probably around the 6.6 million pixel point - 3000 x 2200)..."

The nine hundred buck Coolpix 990, announced at the end of January '00, had 3.34 megapickles, compared to the 1.3 of the thousand-dollar Sony Mavica FD-88 that had been released just the previous August. (The actual usable MP totals were more like 1.2 for the Mavica and 3.1 for the Coolpix, but when you're in that vicious of an advertising war, you claim every fraction you can.)

"Make sure you don't leave so much as a kilopixel lying on the table!"

These days, of course, full-frame sensors of forty, fifty, or sixty megapixels are everywhere and medium format sensors have crossed the triple-digit MP threshold...with no decimal places this time.

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Too Late to the Party

Return with me to the distant past of...oh, let's call it 2005 or so. Cell phones are everywhere, but not yet universal. While a significant percentage of high school students have their own mobile, a cell phone is still a "going off to college" thing, as often as not.

Facebook and YouTube are in their larval states. AOL Instant Messenger is still extremely popular. Various phones were integrating limited browser functions, but with mobile phones like the RAZR, texting was still the primary form of communication.

It was into this environment that Sony, a company known for being willing to try weird experiments, released a device called the "mylo COM-1"in September of 2006. The name stood for MY Life Online, and it was a little miniature tablet thingie with a slide-out keyboard. It could run a web browser and do email anywhere there was a wifi signal.

Thing is, despite being targeted largely at teens who didn't have cell phones, it had a sort of jellybean Playskool "My First Toy Handheld" look about it and cost $350 at launch. That was a lot of clams for something that looked like a kiddie toy and had a crude 2.4" 320x240 pixel display.

So less than a year and a half later, in January of 2008, Sony dropped the "mylo COM-2" on the market. The COM-2 was slicker and more adult-looking, sharing its form factor with the PlayStation Portable.

It had a tack-sharp 3" 640x480 LCD that added touchscreen functionality, and a tethered stylus was included, attached to the neoprene carrying sleeve. They keyboard was improved, and was now backlit. There were menu shortcuts for the most popular communications apps of the day...

The browser now supported Flash for playing YouTube videos and online games. There was a 1.3MP camera on the backside with a convex mirror next to the lens for taking selfies. The desktop could be configured with your most-used apps.

It had its own built-in music and video players, and a photo album. It had a feed reader and built-in games. It could transmit music and pictures to other nearby mylos. 

It was really a slick little device...

Thing is, between the launch of the COM-1 and COM-2, it was almost instantly rendered obsolete by the announcement of the iPhone, which could do all of this stuff and then some. Plus, you know, you could use the Apple device to make phone calls.

The COM-2, launched in January for $299 (yes, all that added capability over the COM-1 came with a fifty dollar price cut; Sony could see the writing on the wall) and by the 2008 holiday season was being fire-saled for $199. Slow sales caused it to be quietly discontinued by the end of the following year.

Smartphones and tablets killed a lot of categories: They decimated handheld GPS's and cheap cameras and palmtop computers; they cut deeply into the sales of calculators and handheld games and MP3 players. The one thing they killed that almost nobody remembers is the "smart not-phone", since it was only around for a year or so and sank without a ripple.

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At the Controls

Compared to a modern digicam in the same price bracket, the controls on the Mavica FD88 are fairly spartan...

Just barely visible on the left side of the camera is a two-position up/down slider switch to set focus to Auto or Manual. In manual mode, focus is adjusted by spinning a ridged chrome metal ring around the lens that's not actually physically coupled to anything; it's just a rotary electronic input.

There are switches on the left side of the back panel there for turning the LCD illumination on or off, adjusting display brightness, and playback volume for the camera's beeps and video playback. Arranged vertically down the right-hand side are the zoom control (left for wide, right for tele), the power button with its bright green safety tab, and the eject button for the diskette. Fortunately disk ejection is manual so that even if the battery goes toes up, you can still pop the disc out and get your files to a computer via sneakernet.

The cluster of controls on the bottom center and left include a slider that controls whether the camera records stills, video, or is in playback mode. The "display" button toggles through the various settings on the viewscreen, depending on how much info you want cluttering the margins while you're trying to shoot.

The flash control toggles through On, Off, and Auto, while "Program" presets the exposure to favor various settings, or it can be left in the default Auto.

The "Picture Effect" button gave various JPEG adjustments. There was a B&W setting as well as a Negative one, the latter reversing the colors, as you'd expect.

There was also Sepia:

...and Solarize:

The round D-pad looking button was toggled upward to enter the camera's menu system on the screen and then for navigating around inside the menus.

There were toggles for the self-timer and macro modes (macro could focus surprisingly close on these, down to a couple inches).

Then there was the File submenu...

In there you had the disc tool for formatting or copying, the image size submenu for selecting resolution, the quality submenu to toggle between Fine and Normal JPEG compression, and "Rec Mode". The latter was interesting because it could be toggled between NORMAL, which just took a picture; VOICE, which let you record a short audio note with each still photo; and EMAIL, which saved a compressed 320x240 thumbnail along with each JPEG that was suitable for attaching to emails in the days of limited bandwidth.

Then there was the Camera submenu...

Digital Zoom let you toggle that feature off, which you should if you don't want to accidentally junk your resolution every time you try to take a long telephoto shot. White Balance lets you preselect for certain lighting conditions, although even back in '99 the Auto setting worked surprisingly well. Flash Level is what it sounds like, and Exposure gives you plus or minus 1.5EV of exposure compensation in .5EV increments.

I used the FD88 to shoot some of the first gun pictures I ever put on internet forums twenty years ago.

Playing with it today is a big nostalgia kick!

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Origin Stories

While it's one of the largest camera companies these days, Sony was not traditionally a camera company. It wasn't until the digital era that they put their corporate toe in photographic waters.

A clue to the origins of their photographic endeavors can be found in the name of this camera. See, "Mavica" isn't one of those made-up focus group words, but rather a portmanteau of "MAgnetic VIdeo CAmera".

Sony had long been a provider of consumer- and professional-grade video cameras and as far back as the 1980s had dabbled with making stills cameras that would store pictures that were essentially a single frame of analog video signal on a specialized 2" Video Floppy magnetic disc.

The breakout for them was the Digital Mavica line of the late '90s, starting with the Digital Mavica MVC-FD5, which stored images as digital jpeg files on a conventional 3.5" 1.44MB floppy.

This was a huge success in the US, hitting the market just as broadband internet access was growing by leaps and bounds. Instead of needing specialized cables or a card reader, you could snap a picture of your car or your cat or your gun or your boat or your garden and upload it to the internet for all your friends on your hobby forum to gawp at.

Real Estate agents loved the things. You could snap pics of a listing and get them onto the 'net without having to stop by a photo lab or scan anything. They were found in medical and dentistry offices, schools, cop cars, and anyplace else people needed to get pictures on the net quickly.

The very thing that made them popular, however, contained the seeds of their downfall.

Storage on a floppy was limited and slow. In 1024x768 resolution with image quality set to FINE, a disc would only hold six to eight shots, even fewer in 1280x960.

At the same time, the iMac and iBook were surging in popularity; suddenly not every computer had a 3.5" floppy disc, which had been a staple feature of desktop computing for nearly a decade. Sony, a company never afraid to throw a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what stuck, briefly dabbled with a Mavica line that wrote to a mini optical CD-RW disc (wouldn't that be an "Opvica" rather than a "Mavica"? Anyway...)

The writing was on the wall for the Mavica line by 2001. They went from being seemingly everywhere to being quaint antiquities that recorded images on a mysterious object shaped like a "SAVE" icon in a surprisingly few years. Popping a disc out of a Mavica in public today will get even more baffled looks than removing a roll of film.

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Optical Zoom, Digital Zoom

Leaving a friend's house the other day, he spotted a bald eagle perched in the top of a tree across the street.

Using the Wide/Tele rocker on the Mavica, I ran it out to the full optical zoom. You have to be careful when doing this because the indicator will slide across the W->T scale and pause only briefly at the hash mark that indicates you've run out of optical zoom and the camera is going to start applying "digital zoom", i.e. cropping, to get out to its full claimed 16X zoom range.

The lens on the FD88 is a 4.75-38mm f/2.8-3 zoom which, given the 7.21x crop factor of the tiny 1/3" sensor, has a focal length equivalent to a 34-270mm lens on a full-frame sensor. Also, the Mavica can only shoot in its base ISO of 100, although given how noisy it would be at higher ISOs, that's probably not a problem.

Anyhow, here we are using the maximum optical zoom to try and get a picture of the eagle, at full resolution on the "Fine" setting:

I also had the Nikon D800 with me. It was an overcast day and I'd had the ISO set at 400, and the lens I had on the camera was Nikon's trusty 24-120mm f/4 VR, which is a good lens but 120mm isn't a lot of reach on a full-frame sensor.

Here's what the shot looked like with the D800:

Thing is, the D800's 36MP sensor, which has over 27 times the photosites and nearly fifty times the physical area of the one on the elderly Sony, allows one to crop very aggressively if necessary...

Space and Resolution

I spent some time exploring the different resolutions on the Mavica FD88 the other day. Basically you have three different resolutions in which you can record jpegs, and you also have the choice of recording in either "Fine" or "Normal" quality, which controls the compression on the jpeg.

The Mavica FD88 could shoot in 640x480 "Standard" which was a pretty aggressively compressed jpeg, to fit the most pictures possible on a 3.5" 1.44MB disc. This image is only 66kb. Of course in 1999, there was a good chance these photos would need to be transmitted over a 56k dialup connection.

This shot was at 1024x768 resolution, also "standard" compression. This was 130kb, so you could fit a lot fewer of them on a floppy. This was also the most common monitor resolution at the time, so if you smeared this across a 17" CRT screen, compression artifacts would be getting noticeable.

A max resolution 1.3 megapixel image, 1280x960 pixels, shot in "Fine" quality, took up 320kb on a 1.44MB floppy.

Depending on how busy the images were, you could only get three to five of these max resolution Fine quality jpegs on a disc.

Still, with images increasingly being viewed on handheld screens, this 1999 camera picture has more resolution than can be fully displayed on a 2012 Samsung Galaxy S III.

This last image, an 8688x5792 pixel jpeg, was shot with a Canon EOS 5DS. 

Funnily enough, despite being so large that you would need nine or ten 3.5" floppies to hold it all...this picture file is bigger than an entire Windows 3.11 install...it doesn't hold up to pixel-peeping very well.

As an experiment I was using an old EF 28-135mm IS USM lens that came out in 1998. It works fine on older digital cameras and is plenty for film, but just isn't very sharp anywhere when you zoom in on a fifty megapixel image. 

Add in the compression of viewing it online on a screen with a fraction of its native resolution, and that's a lotta wasted data. (The RAW file is 57.3MB before processing in Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw. That's bigger than an uncompressed Win95 install.)

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