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Comment by gm-conspiracy | Hacker News Reader

Still miss my Sony Mavica digital camera that took 3.5" disks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica#Digital_still_came...

We had one of those at work. It was surprisingly handy to be able to put in your own disk take some pictures, pop out the disk, and hand the camera back. We could also take some pictures for a client and just hand them a floppy while at their office or in the field without having to worry about finding a computer and copying them over.

That workflow is no different than today with SDCards or CompactFlash cards.

Most people don't have piles of SDcards just lying around, nor do most people feel happy with just giving away the SDcard they happen to have in their camera if someone wants to keep a few photos they took.

I wonder how much that would change if one could get SDs in a box of 10 or more at a time, rather than having to grab them individually from the rack.

Same thing with optical. I can get a spindle of 50 blanks, so handing off a couple would not bother me.

I don't know about current cameras, but most of my old cameras have the SD card slot on the inside of the battery compartment or somewhere else kinda inconvenient (and forget about it on most phones - if it's accessible at all).

The thing about the Mavica was that the floppy just popped in and out on the side, just like a floppy drive. Nothing difficult about swapping in a new floppy.

Now - if your world of cheap SDs in 10 packs came about, hopefully the manufacturers would put the card slot in an easy/intuitively accessible areas (and make it easy to pop one in and out - likely using one of the auto-locking push in to release mechanisms).

At this point, though, it doesn't really matter - your phone backs the pics up to the cloud, it's easy to share them from there (or just click on the pic(s) and "share" via umpteen billion options).

It's a nice thought, and I know you don't mean it seriously - the world's moved on, I guess...

Slotting 3.5" floppies into a camera felt oddly satisfying. The write speeds didn't seem that bad either.

something about that mechanical locking perhaps?

One thing we have lost with moving to USB and SD slots.

USB yes; but many SD slots have the "press in to lock", "press in again to unlock and remove" (even micro-sd). Only when it's something cheaper (like a reader dongle) are they generally just a friction fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J0Aw2Z-8-k

8-bit guy talking about it, and a few others.

I have one and love it to this day. I keep 100 actively tested good floppy disks from floppy disks dot com just for that camera. Super fun.

My Mavica took some of the best pictures in terms of quality, even though it was only 640x480.

I still have one, I really don't think the image quality is that bad considering its age.

Wasn't it something like 1 or 2 megapixels? For many purposes, that's not bad at all.

I still keep around a few old Kodak DC3200 cameras, which have a 1.3 mp resolution for use in my shop. One of those was my second digital camera (well, as long as you don't count the various video digitizers I've owned over the years - starting with a DS-69B on my TRS-80 Color Computer); my first real digital camera was this el-cheapo something-or-another that took grainy 320x240 images.

I keep and use the DC3200s in my shop because I don't care if I handle them while my hands are grimy or whatnot, while they still take a decent picture. Their only downside is that they use CF cards, but I still have a ton of those anyhow.

Mine is 1.3, it takes images at a VGA resolution. A single image at full res practically fills up the floppy disk, I've got to shoot at a lower quality if I want to take more images.

I'm positively spoiled by my Sony A6000.

I had the lesser model of Mavica that I think could only take pictures in 640x480; at least, it seems like all of my pictures with it are 640x480. Not sure now whether it could do 800x600 or whether that was just the more expensive model.

No need to miss it. They show up for sale on the Goodwill auction site pretty regularly.

A lot of police forces still use those kind of cameras to take mug shots. I know my precinct does

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