Customer Reviews

Sony MVC-FD88 Mavica 1.2MP Digital Camera with 8x Optical Zoom

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Between my business and my family I am a big user of cameras, video equipment and computers. My first digital camera had great resolution but the labor-intensive downloading and the massive battery use meant the camera didn't see much action. So when I set out to buy a new digital camera I knew what I wanted, a Mavica. After careful evaluations of the Mavica series I decided to spend the extra money for the FD88. With its great resolution, power usage, big zoom, ease of downloading, mpeg abilities, camera features, etc. the FD88 has become the work horse of my equipment. The disk storage would be comparable to a 12 or 24 shot roll of film depending on your resolution setting.

The Sony Mavica FD88 is a terrific digital camera, especially for someone new to the genre and not necessarily extremely Computer literate. It takes great shots and the floppy disk storage medium is very easy to use and download to your PC. While its rated 1.3 million pixels is not as high as some other high level models from other manufacturers, in reality not too many people are going to appreciate much of a difference; the pictures look great, crystal clear, and very professional. Well worth the price.

This is my first digital camera, and I am glad that I bought it! It is easy to learn to use, taking me less than 1 hour to become extremely proficient using it.

Contrary to other cameras, the included battery has a long life, lasting about 1 1/2 hours. I recommend that you purchase an extra though so that you'll always have an ample supply of power. Another plus with this camera is that the batteries charge quickly, something like 2 hours.

Although limited to 1 MB, the 3.5 inch floppy disk storage method is simple and very convenient. Remove the disk from the camera, pop it into your desktop, and then call up the picture. Easy and fast. On the low resolution you can get about 35 pictures to a floppy and about 10 on the highest resolution.

Alother fun feature is the TV playback. Just plug the included cable into the audio/video plug in your TV or VCR and then you operate the camera as you would a remote control. Just like a slide show of your own creation on TV. This a really nicxe feature for showing pictures to family and/or company.

Overall, this is a nice product and worth the extra money. I am very glad that I got it, and you will too. If your only looking for basic internet picture taking though, this is not for you b/c of the numerous features.

This camera has a lot going for it. The first picture I took turned out great! The camera is very user friendly which is good because the manual that Sony provides is not very well organized or well written.

I find the floppy disk storage to be easy and convenient. The camera allows you to make a copy of the disk right in the camera so you can share copies of photos with friends on the spot.

The Mpeg movies are a fun little add on. I am taking the camera to England in April and I think it will be fun to capture little movie clips over there.

The rechargeable battery seems to be adequate. I am planning to purchase the more powerful one that provides longer charge.

The video and audio cables provided allow easy viewing of the photos on the TV set.

The only negatives with the camera are the difficulty holding the view steady when the zoom is on (but no other digital camera maker provides a zoom this powerful) Also, the light that leaks out of the window at the top of the LCD screen. This can be annoying in a dark room.

Overall, this camera delivered the features that I was looking for.

We bought this and are 100% satisfied. We borrowed ourfriend's MVC-73 and took about 100+ pictures before our MVC-FD88arrived. The thing about this camera is that you don't worry about running out of storage media - just about any store sells floppies and cheaply. And, the secret to getting those great pictures is to take alot of them. We have coworkers who own more than 2 digital cameras made by different manufacturers, that use other storage media, and are still looking for the right combo of features and performance. If we get another camera it will be an upgraded Mavica. If we had bought a camera that used a memory stick, compact flash, smart media card we wouldn't have the hundreds of photos that we have now - (our camera arrived in January 2000). Floppies are so cheap! Sony does it again with ease of use as well. Compared to other cameras, Sony's menu really is intuitive. It just makes sense. If you buy this camera, buy the accessory kit. The battery that comes with the kit is cheper than buying the battery by itself! Tips: Here's the way we use it. We carry about 3-4 floppies on short outings, more on longer outings. Sometimes we carry my notebook. If we run out of floppies, we upload them to the notebook, or on the nearest computer. We leave the default file names alone (mvc-xxxx) serialnumber and place each disk's worth in a folder for that month (2000-03 for march, 2000-04 for april). We then erase and re-use the diskette. Next when we get the chance, we upload our pictures from the notebook or friend's computer onto one of our free photo storage accounts on the web - again leaving the filename as the first part of the description along with an additional description, if we have time. We also download our pictures or copy them off the notebook to our main computer. Then we make backup copies of the folders with the pictures on our main computer's hard drive. So we usually have 3 copies in accessible places - main computer drive, web and CD/Orb. Hard drives do crash so you'll want to keep backup copies on another site or media. When we're out with our camera at friend's homes, sharing pictures is so easy, since we can leave them a copy of our pictures on their computer. (more backups!). I suspect by the end of the year we will have several CDs filled with our pictures taken by this camera. Finally, read the manual so you'll know how to work all the features packed into this camera. END

What an AWESOME camera -- I can't say enough good about this camera. It is so user friendly that we purchased it for my 70+ year old parents for Christmas, and they are already using it to sell things at online auction sites. Resolution is EXCELLENT, ease of use is exceptional, and you cannot beat the convenience of just popping a disk into your computer and pulling up the images -- WHY would anyone waste their time (and more importantly their money) on those digital cameras with dumb "smart cards" that require cabling into your computer and all kinds of fancy software. The Sony comes with respectable software, but I HIGHLY recommend purchasing PICTURE IT software -- it is ideal for use with this camera. If I had one criticism it would be about storage space - the floppies don't hold as many pictures as I'd like, but it's really not a big issue unless you're going out somewhere with the intention of taking a lot of pictures and plowing through them later (in which case you just need to take some spare floppies with you). Truly a camera you will buy and be enjoying immediately.

After carefully studying the features, using them inside thestore, and viewing the pictures on one of their display PCs I washappiest with the high resolution photos that the FD-88 produced as well as it's special effect's capability. I also appreciated the lack of legacy adapters and wires. Its use of standard 3.5 floppies is great. You'll be hard pressed to find a computer without a floppy disk now or in the future.

I worked up the courage to buy it, I've been using it for several months now, and I have NO regrets. A couple friends have some of the newer Kodak, AGFA, and Olympus models and they're all disappointed with theirs compared to the FD-88. The disk writes pretty fast and you can get usually 10 or 12 highest quality photos per disk. Movie resolution is good for PC and Web use, but, its 15 sec or 60 sec recording limit can be a little limiting. END

I never thoguht I could have a digital camera that could have such great resolution. I can print my pictures in a 4 by 6 photo paper and my friends would have never thoguht that I did that in a my digital camera. I love its long-battery life, you can pick teh resolution type. And also you can store up to 15 second MPEG video with audio. It has an excellent zoom capability, great resolution, and with its e-mail option all you have to do is just put in the attachment and that is it. And of course there is the use of diskette, there are no cables all you have to do is insert the diskette, open it in any program, EVEN PAINT!and you have your picture. I am completely satisfied, and I would recommend it as a great investment, along with all other accesories that are great for add-ons.

I tried out the Mavica 73 and although I found it great to use for internet photos (and GREAT ZOOM), I decided on the FD-88 for the resolution. I'm glad I made the switch because the short video capability and sound make this camera fun! SONY KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! Only suggestion I would have to Sony is to someday have a camera that would use ZIP disks, although floppies are very convenient! I CONSIDER THIS A "SMALL" CAMERA after having a medium format and carrying around 35mm cameras with large lenses. I'm sticking with Sony and the floppy disks!

I was a little hesitant to purchase this model, because every review I read about it mentioned the bulky size. I decided to compromise on the size to get the feature of being able to store the pictures directly onto floppy disk. To my surprise, the size did not bother me at all, and the camera is actually lighter than I expected. The features of the camera are really great, and the different image size and quality settings allow for a lot of versatility. I love the fact that I don't need any cables or special equipment to download to my computer. I just pop in the floppy disk and it's ready to view or send. I only have two criticisms of this camera, which prevented me from giving it a perfect score: First, the instruction manual is not very clear, and left a lot of questions in my mind. It seems that it was translated hastily into English by a non-native speaker. Second, the e-mail function, which stores the same picture onto disk twice, one regular size and the other compressed for sending through e-mail, is a great function. However, the quality of the compressed e-mail picture is not very good. One helpful hint: If you are going to send your pictures over the internet to your friends, take a regular picture (don't use the e-mail function) and make sure to use a program like NetZip to compress the information first before sending. If you don't, your friends will hate you for making them wait so long to download so much information!