Sony MVC-FD95 Mavica

The FD95 is an excellant camera. I have owned it for a year. I don't use a camera regularly, but with some practice have become accustomed to all the capabilities of the FD95. I am in no way a professional photographer, but about a month ago my son got married. We had an outside wedding, many people taking pictures, and yes of course I snapped off at least 70 photo's at the 1024x768 image size. I did this mainly to conserve disk space on the floppys. I got 9 pictures per floppy. I zoomed in from 40 plus feet away to get some nice head shots and photo's when people did not know I was shooting them, and of course some nice close ups of the hands cutting the cake from about 7 feet away. Later that evening at the after hours party, people were scanning through the photo's I had taken, and I wasn't paying much attention, because I had taken them. I kept getting comments like; wow these are great, have you studied photography, these are better than any professional that I have ever seen. I simply stated It was the digital camera, and anyone could do it. Later as I looked through them I found there was not one bad photo, not one photo had to be cropped or cleaned up, they were all beautiful, and my son and his new wife now have a wonderful photo album, and everyone else has a copy on cd. Photo's have been mailed out to everyone, and the only bad photo is the one taken of me when I was putting a floppy disk in my back pocket, it looked like I was picking my butt. needless to say, I started taking credit for the photo's, but I could not have done it with out the FD95. The thing I did best was picking the shot, and shooting lots of pictures. Writting to the floppy is a little slow. I guess 3 seconds, so one might miss a shot, but even at the 1024x768 image size we have crisp clear 8x10, and 5x7 photo's from any distance I took the pictures. Imagine If I had used the 1600x1200 maximum, but then I could have only got 2-3 pictures per disk, and I surly would have missed some good shots changing out disk's. The FD95 is a great camera, takes great picturs in just about any situation, if you know how to use the white balance and other settings properly. Just play with it.

good battery life, excelent quality picturs, excellant zoom, easy to use, made even me look like a professional photographer

slow writting to the floppy media, veiwing for night shots is quess work.

none

This mavica is heavy duty workhorse that provides excellent quality pictures with lots of features. The memory stick adapter allows you to store hundreds of pictures but you can also use standard floppy disks. It has many accessories you can add to make even more useful. Good camera for intermediate to expert level photographers

Memory stick or floppy disk capabilities A slew of different battery options, from 2 hour up to 15 hour battery life MPEG2 video with 2.1 megapixel quality wide angle and zoom lense attachements LCD viewfinder or Eye Viewer

very big and bulky, gets interference around advanced electronic equipment, such as a hospital room

Sony Mavica FD75

Sony Quality, what else needs to be said. I ''ve never had a problem

The FD95 is huge by today''''s tiny little digital camera standards, and many will say that the floppy disk storage style is out of date and useless. Still, for insurance, police, or real estate folks, or even someone who just wants an easy to use and quick way to view photos, it''''s still a practical. The camera offers full "auto" mode, or you can manually control focus, shutter speed, F-stops, and more. A pop up flash works well within about 10 feet, and a special Sony flash can be ordered that fits on top for flash ranges of 25 feet. The 10X optical image stabilized zoom is the FD-95''''s largest feature. It gets you close to the action, and the I.S. feature steadies the image even with a bit of jittering on your part. A digital zoom can boost this up to 20X, but image quality suffers a little - Sony''''s digital zooms do better than others though, so it''''s still workable. Image quality is a mixed bag (as per my comments in the weakness area). I have used a FD-88, which is a 1.3 megapixel camera, and it holds the same number of images on a floppy at the best resolution, as the FD-95. Since the 95 is a 2 megapixel camera with larger images, math says a floppy should hold FEWER photos than the lower resolution FD-88. It''''s the same, which tells you, the FD-95 compresses the images more than some other models. This results in poorer image quality compared side-by-side to other models, but if you keep it cranked up to it''''s full 1600x1200 image size, they''''re more than acceptable. The camera also offers a maximum 15 second movie mode (with sound), which offers "so-so" movie quality you can email to grandma, etc. With a full battery charge, or using the optional larger battery, you can have a full day of photo shooting with no problem. The electronic viewfinder is nice (like a camcorder''''s), so you can turn off the color LCD on the back to conserve battery power. I found this unit as an "open box" item for literally $199.00. It was missing a battery, charger, and other accessories, but I had an old broken Mavica which used the same items, so for me, this was a great bargain just getting the camera on it''''s own. If you can find it under $400, go for it. If not, the Olympus 2100uz has all the features (and more), and takes much higher quality photos, for around $499 at CompUSA.

The 10X image stabilized zoom is a huge plus. It''''s a fairly easy-to-use camera, and produces acceptable photos. A threaded lens barrel (52mm) allows you to use standard off the shelf filters for lens protection and effects - a really nice feature still not commonly found on newer models out there.

When using the optional floppy disk adapter and memory stick in the camera, the FD95 still uses the same high compression on the photos, so image quality does not increase - only the number of images you can store. Image quality in the 640 and 1024 pixel size modes are generally pretty poor unless you reduce them to an email size of 480 or fewer pixels, so for good quality photos, the user must stick to the 1600x1200 setting.

Various Sony Mavica and Cybershot models, Kodak, and Olympus models.

Have not used.

Told me the order was confirmed, tried to sell a gaurantee. said the camera, Sony fd95 only had a 30 day out-of-country warantee. I didn't buy the 1 year gaurantee. they called next day, said they had oversold and cancelled the order. Forget this one.

I'm in the beginner-amateur category, so I cannot speak for the advanced-manual modes and features. However, the camera always worked great for me, pics are more grainy than the newer 3 Megapixel cameras, but that's to be expected...uses convenient but space-limited floppy discs, and is compatible with any computer. No cables needed. Rechargable battery is a plus, as this puppy burns it up in about an hour of shooting. Heavy camera but has a great 10x optical zoom. Can buy regular camera filters to fit on the lens.

Rechargable battery, regular floppy disc storage, uses 52mm regular camera filters, large LCD, many neat modes, night-picture mode for photography-dummies like myself, great macro (closeups) mode, awesome zoom.

Heavy, expensive, high-resolution pics will only fit a few on one disc...not too many weaknesses IMO.

Olympus zoom 3000, analog Nikon N60, Nikon 35mm point-shoot camera

never had to use--a plus!