So I bought myself a brand new Mavica MVC-FD 95 for my birthday. It's as big as a video camera, will actually shoot video, 15 seconds at a time, four clips will fit one floppy. One thing that decided me was the media, floppies are so darn cheap and you can use put them into any computer without fancy gadgets. The other thing that decided me was the zoom, it's 10x optical, which is a real zoom, and 20x digital, which isn't real, it's just a way of selecting the digital image. It has a macro function, will focus down to 2 cm. Auto focus, manual override, white balance control.
The Olympus 3030 and the Sony Cybershot F505v were also in the running. The Olympus takes much sharper pictures, but the range is limited, so it would be fairer to say that it takes much sharper pictures within a narrow range. The Cybershot uses whatever medium Sony calls it, not the floppies like the Mavica, I think it's called memory sticks, and those suckers cost a fortune. The Cybershot is capable of the new 3.34 megapixel images, the Mavica only does 2.1 megapixel, so that was a bit of a tradeoff. |
