Is Sony's latest digital camera yet another nail in silver's coffin?
November 23, 2000
nytimes.com
STATE OF THE ART
Sony's New Digital Camera: Filmless? Yes. CD-Less? No.
By DAVID POGUE
DIGITAL cameras offer all kinds of advantages over film cameras. For example, the resulting photos are computer files; you can edit them, send them via e-mail or print only the ones in which your hair doesn't look weird. And the built-in preview screen spares you the humiliation of opening freshly developed prints only to find that in six of them, the primary foreground element is your index finger.
Unfortunately, much of the giddy thrill evaporates the moment you try to transfer the photos to the computer. Transferring them using a cable can be a painfully slow and inconvenient ritual. If your camera stores its photos on a removable memory card (like Compact Flash, Smart Media or Memory Stick), you can equip your PC with a special card reader to accommodate it.
Unfortunately, by the time you've bought the memory cards and the reader, you've nearly doubled the price of the camera.
The Sony Corporation has apparently spent more time than most companies worrying about this camera-to-PC transfer problem. Its first bright idea was the Mavica series, cameras that store pictures on ordinary, dirt- cheap floppy disks, letting you use almost any computer on earth as your photo depot.
Despite their boxy, floppy-dictated design, Mavica cameras have become wildly popular. But the sun is surely setting on the floppy-disk approach. Because a floppy can hold relatively little information, floppy-based Mavicas will always be limited to relatively low-resolution pictures.
These days, digital cameras in the Olympus, Nikon and even Sony Cyber-Shot product lines offer resolutions five or six times as high. That's the background you need to appreciate Sony's latest creation, the Mavica MVC-CD1000. Instead of using floppies, it contains a CD-R burner that actually records each photo permanently on a CD.
These aren't standard five-inch CD's, which would require a camera roughly the size of a microwave oven. Instead, the CD1000 requires special three-inch mini-disks that store 156 megabytes and cost about $4 apiece. (That much capacity in Compact Flash or Memory Stick cards would cost more than $300.)
Grafting a CD burner onto a camera saddles the camera with two immediate drawbacks. First, even with its miniature CD drive, the CD1000 is still a behemoth; you can slip it into your pocket only if you're a kangaroo. Second, the camera costs $1,300, about 50 percent more than its CD-less competitors.
If you're willing to swallow those two bitter pills, the rest of the news is almost all good. The recordable CD feature is, to put it bluntly, sensational. The camera takes only about four seconds to record each shot, about the same as cameras that use memory cards.
If you've ever felt boxed in by the limited memory of rival cameras, the CD1000 will end your digital claustrophobia for good; you can store 160 of its highest-resolution images or a staggering 1,080 low-resolution pictures on a single CD. By the time you've filled your first CD, it will be 2002, and this camera will be listed on eBay for $35.
Fortunately, you don't have to fill the CD before copying pictures to your PC. At any time, you can use the CD1000's complex on-screen menus to "finalize" your CD, which makes it ready for viewing on any Macintosh or Windows computer's CD-ROM drive.
This finalizing business takes about a minute, during which you're supposed to keep the camera on a level surface. (You also lose about 13 MB of disk space per finalization — not enough to lose sleep over, but enough to discourage you from popping the CD into your computer after every shot.)
After you've viewed or copied the pictures on the computer, you can slip the CD back into the camera to continue filling it up. (You can also transfer pictures over a U.S.B. cable, if you have a U.S.B.-equipped Windows PC.)
The CD-burning aspect of the CD1000 is a resounding success. But how is it as a camera?
Like most current digital cameras, this one takes dazzling pictures, especially in extreme close-ups (one inch from the lens) and low-light situations.
Professionals won't find manual controls for everything, but may appreciate the camera's spot metering (for heavily backlighted scenes), the built-in flash with variable intensity, manual overrides for focus and shutter speed, and the camera's unusually long focal length, which accommodates a 10X optical zoom (and contributes significantly to the camera's bulk and heft).
Maybe Sony went so zoom-crazy in hopes of showing off its optical SteadyShot technology, which does an impressive job at eliminating camera shake when you're zoomed in.
Amateurs get their own motley assortment of features. For example, the camera can record 60-second, somewhat unsteady digital movies (it has a speaker and a microphone). You can hook the CD1000 up to a television or VCR for an impromptu slide show. And you can apply several cheesy-looking special effects — one that produces a negative (black-for-white) image, for example.
Both amateurs and serious shooters will appreciate not just the 2.5- inch screen, but also the through-the- lens eyepiece liquid crystal display that's smart enough to turn off when not pressed against your eye — a useful battery-saving stunt.
Not that you'll worry much about power; this camera uses the same rechargeable battery found in Sony camcorders. It recharges whenever you plug in the camera's power cord and displays a "minutes remaining" counter in the viewfinder.
So much clever engineering is on display in the CD1000, in fact, that two boneheaded design elements stand out.
First, for some peculiar reason, the live image in the viewfinder freezes for half a second as your finger pushes down the shutter. That's a real problem if you're trying to capture just the right shot of something that's moving quickly, like runners, skaters or children under 5.
Second, the camera's maximum resolution is 1,600 by 1,200 pixels (2.1 megapixels). That's fine, but so 1999. Such photos look gorgeous on the PC screen — in fact, they're too big to fit on a typical 17-inch screen without scrolling — but if you print them out at traditional photo quality (256 dots per inch), their maximum print size is about 4 by 6 inches.
For a few hundred dollars less, you can buy a 3.5-megapixel digital camera, suitable for making 6-by-8 printouts at true photo quality. Even 4- megapixel cameras have just become available in this price range.
Of course, with these rival cameras, you're still hounded by incessant worries about running out of storage. Sony's new machine may be big, heavy and expensive, but there's no denying that its CD technology radically changes the experience of using a digital camera.
Can you imagine shooting 160 pictures without reloading — on any kind of camera? To make matters better, the CD is instantly available for popping into a computer, handing off to a colleague or filing away for permanent archiving.
The CD1000's creators should clink their champagne glasses; they have proved that the recordable CD is nearly ideal for digital photography. Next to that amazing engineering feat, their next challenge — designing a smaller, less expensive model with even better resolution — should be a piece of cake. |
