Here’s the ‘Mavica’ (Magnetic Video camera) FD7, from about 1997.

The 1.4 megabyte black ‘floppy’, but rigid, disc (on the right) fits inside, and holds about 22 or 23 images or so - depending on the amount of detail in each photo.

The credit card is for scale, to show the size of the camera.

The 10x zoom lens is fitted vertically INSIDE the camera, and so doesn’t project out of the camera body.

In summary; not bad for a 0.3 megapixel camera ..with a 40mm-400mm zoom lens. EXCELLENT EXTREME CLOSE-UPS, and reasonably average - for its era - general and distant views. Simple to use (squeeze’n’press autofocus), with over and under-exposure adjustment, choice of picture styles, horrible flash, but around 22 to 24 (or even more) reasonable-ish quality pics on a 30 pence floppy disc.

A really VERSATILE, but rather bulky (because of the floppy disc size) primitive digital camera ..which is still working perfectly TWENTY-SEVEN years after it was made, or bought!

                                                        Th-th-th-That’s All, Folks!

Here, above, is a photo which I took on the 24th November 2002 - more than 20 years ago! - on that disc. (See the actual photo below.) The numbers at the top-right of the photo show that it’s number 1 on a disc of 21 pictures.

Here I’m taking a photo of a coffee cup, with a live-view image of the cup on the rear screen, while the camera auto-focuses on the cup.

The camera can focus as close as the very rim of the lens window on the front of the camera, to give really extreme close-ups!

Sliding the small ‘Play’ or ‘Camera’ switch, just below the centre of the rear screen, to ‘Play’, the camera retrieves the next, or previous, photo from the floppy disc inside the Mavica. In this case, it’s retrieving photo number 22 out of a total of 23 on the disc.

There’s no cable - nor wi-fi or Bluetooth or NFC - connection from the camera (..it’s too old for that!..) so photos can be transferred to a computer only by putting the removable floppy disc into a floppy disc reader ..they were ubiquitous when this camera was made, but have now almost completely disappeared.

Here’s the photo of the coffee cup now being Played on the camera’s screen: note that the figure at top-right shows that this is photo number 23 of 23 on the disc, and the digits at bottom-right show that the photo was taken on 15th August 2024 at 11:32am (today).

The ‘W’ ’T’ sliding switch at top-right of the camera is for zooming the lens between Wide and Telephoto. The On/Off switch is at centre-right, and the circular black ‘joystick’ is for navigating through the actions highlighted;

⬅︎ photo, ➨ photo, Menu and Index.

Here’s that view of the river, shown on the rear screen of the FD7 in the 2nd picture down from the top - above. The camera takes pics 640 pixels wide by 480 pixels high, giving a total of 0.3 of a megapixel. Diagonal lines are somewhat ‘jagged’, but vertical and horizontal lines aren’t too bad. Depending on the amount of fine detail in each photo, the .jpg algorithm uses more space on the floppy disc - or less space, if there’s less detail - so the number of photos which can be stored on one disc will vary, depending on the amount of detail in each photo. (Later Mavicas which could take photos with a higher pixel count could store fewer photos on one disc, of course.)

The Mavica photos are really video scans, consisting of odd and even-numbered lines of pixels. A ‘Fine’ quality photo - like the view above - consists of both odd and even lines of pixels, called a video ‘Frame’. Coarser photos can also be taken, consisting of only alternate lines, and with thus half the detail, known as ‘Fields’ in video terminology. Obviously, many more photos shot using just ‘Fields’ (half a picture’s full detail) can be stored on a single floppy disc.

The ‘jagged’ diagonal lines are a result of there being no real data ‘in between’ the rows of pixels, but in many cases the jaggedness doesn’t really show up, unless a photo is rotated using photo-editing software in a computer.

The camera can’t really capture any details in highlight (bright) areas, and so the sky in this photo is what’s called ‘blown out’ ..all detail has been lost.

However..

Extreme close-ups shot with the lens window right up against an object can be exceptionally sharp, with very little appearance of ‘jaggies’. And the camera can shoot as close as the raised rim just around the lens window. These close-ups have some ‘barrel distortion’, meaning that horizontal lines look slightly curved.

..Here are some EXTREME close ups of single frames (24mm x 18mm) of cinema film, including the wiggly optical soundtracks and the sprocket holes. These are individual frames from ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ - a film about a cinema - and from ‘Singin’ In The Rain’, and a James Bond film:

(These low-pixel-count images were of sufficient quality to use on printed brochures which advertised ‘next week’s films’ for my old cinema.)

The 10x zoom lens is sufficiently good to take sharp pictures of distant things like these famous twisted brick chimneys high on the roof of Hampton Court Palace..

The lens and picture processing are not so good for medium distance portraits, though ..by comparison, current digital cameras don’t ‘blow out’ highlights, provide much more detail and tonal range ..these next few pictures are ‘good enough’ as snapshots, or the digital equivalent of Polaroid snaps..

Here’s a picture - taken on 16th February 1998 - of my father holding a photo of my brother and sister-in-law. Every image has its own date and time stamp ..though not in the nowadays normal EXIF format, and so can’t necessarily be read by normal EXIF-reading software..

This hasn’t been edited, enhanced or sharpened in any way, and gives a reasonable idea of what the Mavica FD7 can produce indoors, in reasonable lighting. A bit of enhancement or sharpening would make the photo look ‘sharper’ or more ‘detailed’, and more like a photo from a more recent digital camera. I’d say that the quality’s similar to a simple print from a basic square format 126 Kodak ‘Instamatic’ drop-in film cartridge (remember those?) - or to a peel-apart colour Polaroid film.

The Mavica FD7 lets you choose over or under-exposure if the picture on its rear screen doesn’t have the exact brightness you want, lets you choose Normal or Fine quality, and lets you choose ‘Field’ or - better quality - ‘Frame’ recording. But (keeping things simple) it DOESN’T let you choose an aperture or shutter speed or ISO sensitivity ..that’s all done automatically by the internal electronics. So it’s a 10x zoom ‘Point’n’Shoot’. I think I used an add-on wide-angle adaptor for that shot, hence the somewhat curved verticals.

It CAN make ‘reasonable’ photos indoors in very dim light, too: here’s a 1998 photo of a group playing onstage, lit only by reflected light off a cinema screen - which is showing abstract colour shapes - and some front spill from the video projector:

And here’s an old (Boxing Day, 1997) selfie, with the camera, showing the typical CCD ‘smears’ from serious over-exposure of the through-the-window background light on the right-hand side. The lens has a 4.2mm-42mm focal length, equivalent to 40mm-400mm(!), and the maximum - or usual - aperture is f1.8, which - apparently - becomes the equivalent of about f2.9 as you zoom in, or maybe it adjusts automatically depending on the available light. It has a built-in flash ..but the results are just awfully over-exposed and ‘whited-out’, so - apart from trying it once or twice (ugh!) I’ve never afterwards used it.

It has four ‘Effects’ for photography: soft, dreamy ‘Pastel’, ‘Neg Art’ which produces ‘back-to-front’ or ‘inside-out’ negative colours (!), ‘Sepia’ old-fashioned-looking pics from the 1800s, and ‘B&W’, which produces - wait for it! - black & white photos. It also has several ‘Program’ modes - chosen by repeatedly pressing the ‘Program’ button on the rear - like later Sony digital cameras. ‘Soft-Portrait’ mode (wide aperture to produce background blur); ‘Sport’ mode, giving a fast shutter speed to freeze action; ‘Beach & Ski’ mode, to over-expose and render white snow actually white (instead of reducing it to 18% grey); ‘Sunset & Moonlight’ mode, for slow shutter speeds/long exposures ..and ‘Landscape’ mode, for small aperture ‘everything-in-focus’ pics.

..and another, from almost a third of a lifetime ago..