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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Lungfish: Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro

It seems oddly appropriate to kick off some intermittent posting on this dusty blog with a digital fossil that was not very fossilized when I started here back in '07. Heck, in 2007, the Fujifilm FinePix S2 Pro was barely dead; it didn't exit the catalog until the end of 2003, replaced by the S3 Pro.

Fuji was an early player in the digital photography world. In fact, when legendary German camera brand Leica decided to dip their toe in the consumer digital market, their first offerings were re-skinned Fujifilm digital cams.

During those early years, digital cameras were mostly novelty toys and the few professional digital cameras for use by photojournalists and such were collaborations between Kodak and film camera makers like Nikon and Canon, grafting a digital sensor made by the former onto a conventional film camera body made by the latter.

That early era of Frankenstein DSLRs would seem to have come to an end with Nikon and Canon launching their own entirely in-house offerings in 1999-2001, but there was one holdout.

See, Fujifilm was eager to get in on this DSLR action, and they had some interesting sensor technology to offer the market, but they didn't have a modern autofocus single lens reflex camera , having essentially bailed on the 35mm SLR market in the Eighties. So Fuji turned to a deal with Nikon, who would supply the actual camera bits, onto which Fuji would graft the digital sensor and hardware to make it work.

Fuji had worked with Nikon before, producing sensors for the company's early "E-series" DSLRs. Further, using Nikon hardware for their own DSLR launch would let Fuji buyers immediately piggyback off the vast Nikon F-mount lens library, so it seemed a win-win.

The initial offering from this pairing was the FinePix S1 Pro, which was built on a Nikon N60 body and had two marketing problems: First, asking people to shell out $3500 for a DSLR built on the chassis of a $300 entry-level film SLR is kind of a big ask. Second, Fuji marketing stumbled badly in the description of the sensor.

Fuji's SuperCCD sensor had 3.1 million photodiodes, but rather than arranging them horizontally & vertically, they were in diagonal rows and the resulting image was interpolated into a 6.2 megapixel image...so Fuji marketed the S1 as a 6.2MP camera. At the time, the $3,000 Canon D30 had a 3.1MP sensor and the $5,500 Nikon D1 had 2.7, so this was a big deal, at least until everyone started complaining about the actual number of photodiodes.

At any rate, the S1 Pro was succeeded in 2002 by the S2 Pro which was an upgrade in several ways. Importantly, it used the much more high-end Nikon N80 as the base camera, which made it feel a lot less chintzy and offered much-improved capabilities over the downmarket N60. Second, the new iteration of the SuperCCD had a 6.1MP sensor that, using the same interpolation method, turned out images of a jaw-dropping (for the time) 12MP resolution.

While the S2 was a modest success and was itself succeeded by a couple more iterations of Nikon-based cameras with Fuji sensors, Fuji eventually abandoned the DSLR market in '09 to concentrate on its mirrorless offerings.

A friend noticed this S2 Pro in a pawn shop, where it had languished for a while with a $50 price tag before moving to the bargain table, where it was scooped up along with several old video game carts and one of the old swivel-lens Nikon Coolpix cameras, the whole lot going for a Jackson. Not having much in the way of Nikon glass and knowing my love for weird old cameras, he passed the S2 Pro along.

It's an interesting artifact of its era. Its Frankenstein nature becomes apparent in that the Nikon camera part still runs on the same 2 CR123 batteries as a regular N80, but there's also a pull-out tray for four AA cells to power the grafted-on Fuji digital bits.

There are two card slots, but unlike modern systems, you have to decide in the menu whether you want to record to the SmartMedia or the CF card bay. It won't record to both simultaneously.

SmartMedia is a pretty well dead format, kept alive mostly because apparently some keyboards (the musical instrument, not the input device) use them. The largest SmartMedia cards only ran to 128MB, and I found a new-old-stock Fuji 32MB one on Amazon. Shooting in 12-bit CCD RAW, the 32MB card will hold precisely two images. Fortunately I have plenty of smallish CF cards formatted in FAT16 lying around from the D1x.

The top plate, at first glance, is straight-up Nikon N80. The difference is the Mode Dial, which has been replaced with one that adds the self-explanatory "ISO", whereby you adjust sensitivity by twiddling the Command Dial with the Mode Dial in this position, and the more cryptic "CSM", which puts you in the FinePix's Custom Settings Menu.

On the back of the camera is a small monochrome LCD for toggling through basic camera operations, as well as displaying ISO and resolution. Below that is a 1.8" color LCD for reviewing photos and the camera's basic setup menus: time & date, card formatting, CF/SmartMedia, color space, resolution, and suchlike.

One last feature that seems odd compared to modern DSLRs is the settings menu for the rear display. After every photo you can either have it off; set it to "postview", which is what we would call "preview" nowadays, showing the image you just took; set it to "preview", where it will display the image you just took and not actually record it until you press the F2 button; and "preview + histogram", which is what it sounds like.

I was stumped at first because it wasn't recording the pictures I had taken. This was because I had the camera set to "preview" using my current understanding of the term. Oops.

Once I got it figured out, though, I was pretty happy with the performance of the old SuperCCD...

Beep.

Beep boop.

I bow to the master.

I've got a few older handheld video games: A Gameboy and a Game Gear and a Game Boy Advance, but this is the best shrine to old handhelds I've seen. And they're all mounted with velcro so he can take them down and play them.

Now I'm all nostalgic for my old Tomy Hit & Missile...

eMac gripe.

I've been using my eMac as my media server-cum-iPod docking station for about a year and a half, and it serves its purpose just fine, but I do have one serious gripe: That keyboard blows goats.

Seriously, could it possibly have less tactile feedback? Perhaps if they used stale marshmallows under the keys instead of fresh ones...

The only reason I haven't replaced it with the old keyboard from the iMac is that it's footprint is so much smaller, which is an important consideration in a keyboard that gets used maybe once a week. That and it's... well, prettier and cooler-looking, and the white keyboard matches the eMac. How Mac-dorky is that?

One thing that I am impressed with, however, is how useful it still is for web surfing; for a six-year-old machine, it's still capable of most everything short of gaming or video-heavy applications.

Handhelds again...

The experiment with the Gameboy Advance was annoying.

The games I tried were remarkably sophisticated for a handheld console, considering that my previous handheld experiences had been limited to the Game Boy and Sega Game Gear. Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed retained at least the flavor of the PC version, and Eye of the Beholder was pretty much identical to the classic SSI PC games; unsurprising considering that the Game Boy Advance probably had roughly the same wheaties as the 286 on which I first experienced the classic "Gold Box" AD&D computer games.

The fatal flaw of the GBA was the unlit LCD screen, which really cut down on the places where I could really enjoy it. It quickly began gathering dust...

Stymied.

The aforementioned Apple IIc has just sat forlornly in its case since it arrived on my doorstep. Last night it occurred to me that I hadn't inspected the flat, zippered compartment on the case's lid...

Hey! 5.25" floppies! With the names of what appear to be games on them!

Today I worked up my mojo to pull the little monitor up from the basement and set the machine up, only to find that I was short a video cable. Now, given who my roomie is, I know there have got to be a squillion cables lying about the house, but I'm going to have to wait 'til she gets home to find one.

Bummer.

It's calling to me.

I have an Apple IIc, complete with the bitty little green screen Apple monitor, that I accidentally won in an eBay auction.

Lately I've had this bad urge to hit the web and see if I could scare up some games for it. It'd be neat to play Castle Wolfenstein, Wizardry, or F-15 Strike Eagle in the old school original.

Back on Mac.

Well, my old P4 tower puked its power supply last night, and that meant cranking up the eMac.

It's only a year younger than the wintel box, and it was a stripper when it was new, compared to the P4, whose video card alone cost nearly a quarter of the eMac's purchase price.

Still, I used the G4/500 "Sawtooth" tower for the better part of a year, and this thing is a ton better than it. We'll see how long it takes me to cry "uncle" and repair or replace the PC.

I totally fell into the internet...

The Obsolete Technology Website: All your favorite old computers, plus many of which you've never before heard, plus scans of original ads, downloadable goodies, and more!

Speaking of handheld games...

I had this one when I was maybe ten or eleven that I traded away from a neighborhood kid. You controlled this missile launcher at the bottom of the screen with a knob that moved it left and right and a button that sent your missile shooting straight up towards the top of the screen.

Enemy aircraft crossed from left to right at different speeds and altitudes. When it died, I cracked it open and was fascinated to see that it was entirely electromechanical: Each flight level of aircraft was a filmstrip that scrolled in a continuous loop. Your missile ran on a vertical track; the "reload" time was how long it took to get the little backlit plastic missile back down to the bottom of the screen.

Given all the monkey motion going on inside that little plastic case, it's a wonder that it survived as long as it did in my hands.

Fossil-ish...

I like supporting local retailers, and there's a little joint called The Game Station that I try to stop by once a month or so, even if it's just to take advantage of their 3-for-$20 DVD wall.

Every time I'm in there, I glance in the case full of handhelds, just to see what's new, since I've been planning on adding to my feeble handheld collection for some time now. (Currently I only have the original Game Boy and the Sega Game Gear.) Yesterday, I noticed that they had a couple of Game Boy Advance units for, like $16 each, and a copy of Eye of the Beholder for $8. Heck, that's almost free! And for an old-school D&D geek like myself, that's a nearly irresistible combination.

Let's see how this thing works...

It's too big to be a space station!

At not quite 40 pounds, the original G3 iMac was a handful to move, but the eMac? Yikes. I think it tips the scales at shade over a desk-busting fifty pounds with its built-in 17" CRT.

The one I snagged off eBay (for a buy-it-now price of $80) is a 1.25GHz G4, circa early 2004. At only five years old, it's stretching the definition of "fossil", but with the demise of the PowerPC Macs, even a big G5 tower more or less rates the term these days.

The eMac, which sold new for about $800 in 2004, just absolutely crushes my G4/500 tower in any objective set of benchmarks, and the G4 sold for $3,500 stripped just four years before the eMac, which is ready to boot out of the box. Never let it be said that Apple doesn't have some schizoid pricing practices.

Ports are abundant, with 2 FireWire and three USB 2.0 ports easily accessible on the right side of the case towards the front, and another USB port on the backside of the keyboard. The keyboard is Apple's attractive white/clear "borderless" unit, where it looks as though the keys are hovering above the lucite slab.

One big area of improvement over the earlier G3 iMac is the speakers: while they don't exactly provide floor-shaking bass, they are leaps and bounds better than the tinny units in the old iMac. This makes the machine excel as a second computer for watching movies and doing simple 'net chores, although it will choke on media-heavy sites unless you cram in more RAM than the 512MB with which mine shipped.

I'll post more detailed impressions after I've played with it some more.

Constant craving...

During a recent long car ride with a friend, we got to talking about old video games, reminiscing about favorites from the previous decade like Privateer, Aces of the Pacific, Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe, Full Throttle, and Gabriel Knight.

Man, I need to set up a 486 running DOS so I can get all those old CDs down from the attic...

Mysteries of science.

Okay, so I'm ripping my CD collection to iTunes via my old iMac DV SE.

The target directory is on my external FireWire disc. On some CDs, things bog down to the point where I'm showing stuff being imported at "0.3x", and it will occasionally even choke completely.

What the heck is causing that?

Neat-o!

Mac-on-a-stick! Or a keychain...

I'll be giving that a try with my SE.

Friden Flexowriter.

It's like a typewriter for writing love notes to HAL.

If computing technology was the animal kingdom, that thing would be wondering in its little fishy brain whether its fins would support it on dry land or not.

Thanks to the magic of FireWire Target Disk Mode...

...I finally got OS 10.4 running on my G4 Sawtooth.

For those who are unfamiliar with Macs, Target Disk Mode (first in SCSI, later in FireWire) is a neat method that allows you to power up a Mac in such a way that you can use it as an external hard drive for another machine. Pretty handy.

In this case, I've had problems with the antediluvian 1X Matsushita DVD on the Sawtooth not being able to read modern DVDs. The situation was to boot the G4 into Target Disk Mode and hook it by FireWire cable to the iMac, which saw it as a local drive. Then I just ran the install for Tiger normally.

It's a beautiful day...

...and I need to write my LEM column.

Also, I need to play with old Macs to get my writing mojo going. I can't decide whether to continue tinkering with the 7100 or to drag down a few of the others I haven't yet booted up and see if they're working and what's on them. There's a Quadra 610 and a Centris 650 that haven't been booted yet; may as well do it while I have the monitor, keyboard, and mouse all down here ready and waiting.

Desperate.

I've got productivity software out the yinyang for old Macs and all the communications widgets I can handle, but I'm desperate to find some games that will work on 680x0 machines and/or early PPC Macs.

Got any? Let's make a deal: tamslick A T aol D O T com.

Punked out.

So I unhooked the TAM from where it's been sitting in the corner of the dining room and parked it away. I schlepped a 14" Apple monitor, and an old keyboard and mouse down from the attic. I went back upstairs, dug out the massive Quadra 950, dragged it to the head of the stairs, and...

...punked out.

I realized that this beast didn't have a CD-ROM drive. I had never booted it up, and had no clue what OS was already on it. I have no OS floppies well, except for system 6.0.7 for my SE; fat lot of good that does me if something's pooched. There's a SCSI external CD burner around here someplace, but hey, look! A Power Macintosh 7100/66! It has a CD drive! And I've played with plenty of Power Macs lately. I'll just work up to tackling the '040 tower gradually by getting my feet wet with a much more familiar old Mac.

I turned the 7100 on for the first time and it chimed to life without a hiccup. It sported 40MB of RAM and (whoah!) a brace of 1.5GB hard drives. That's pretty sexy specs for 1994; I think at the time I was using a 486DX/66 with... 8? 16? MB of memory and a 250MB HDD and there wasn't a game it wouldn't run.

The 7100 was running OS 8.0; I immediately threw in my 8.6 upgrade CD, and while it was crunching away, I went to find my 9.1 CD.

Which was in my TAM. Which was all powered down. Thank $DEITY for paperclips...

Unfortunately, to upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1, you have to boot from the CD, which this 7100 resolutely refuses to do, no matter how I prod it. More later...

Monday's child will boot up in a tower case...

Tomorrow's project: Boot up either the Quadra 900 or Quadra 950 tower, and see if I can get it running OS 8.