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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