I bought a Sony Mavica! And everything about this camera has been such a joy, I can't help but write about it :)
The Digital Mavica line of cameras saved images directly onto a floppy disk. The model I own is the MVC-FD90 which was released in 2000. It captures images at a maximum resolution of 1280×960, but can also shoot at 640×480 to save space on the floppy disk (which can store around 20 photos at that resolution).
Link to this section Inspiration
Earlier this year at Anthro New England, my girlfriend Mia was taking photos on her Mavica and let me try it a bit! It seemed like such a fun and whimsical camera to keep around.
While I was intrigued by the camera, I was a bit intimidated by the floppy disks -- Mia has much more experience with retrocomputing than I do, and I worried that getting disks, a drive, pulling images off the camera, and keeping everything in good shape might be too difficult for me.
Link to this section Swapfest my beloved
It was at the most recent MIT Swapfest that I picked up my beloved Mavica. I purchased it from some very persuasive transfems who had a table dedicated exclusively to Mavica stuff. I bought the model they recommended and they helped me get set up with a battery, strap, etc. I figured that, now that I'm getting settled into post-college life, now was a good time for me to pick up something new!
I'm a big fan of Swapfest: it's almost more of a community gathering to me than a place to buy stuff. Whenever I go I see so many friends, former classmates, and colleagues I know from work. You get to know the tables that come back every month and the people who sell regularly. All in all, it's a great way to spend a Sunday morning!
Link to this section Meticulous unscheduled disassembly
Mavica experts will know that aftermarket batteries tend to be a bit oversized compared to the originals. The folks who sold me mine made sure I was aware of this and even gave me a ribbon to put around the battery. However, in my excitement to try it out, I totally forgot about this and immediately put the battery directly in. I had to disassemble the camera to get it out!
Big thanks to Sony for putting that plastic cover over the flash capacitor... that could've been a nasty shock otherwise 😬
Link to this section My first disk
A few tables at Swapfest hand out free floppy disks to passerby. I had accumulated a total of three disks and found that, miraculously, one of them actually worked! I had a mild panic moment when I realized the camera couldn't always successfully read all of the photos on the disk, it turned out to be easily readable by a USB drive.
At the time, I didn't have any way to read files off of the disk, so I just took as many as I could until it filled up.
Link to this section Getting serious
By this time, I had had enough fun with the camera that I figured I should actually get ahold of some disks and a floppy reader!
Mia advised against me buying a random floppy drive on Amazon, so at the recommendation of my friend Tris, I bought a Dell Latitude drive online for about $6. It's designed to be put into a slot on the laptop, but it actually just has a normal Mini-USB connector. I bought some disks from an Amazon listing that looked legit (it was Maxell brand and had good reviews).
The disks arrived just in time for me to take them on a trip to New York City!
Link to this section Data recovery adventures
After getting back from NYC and finally being able to read the disks, I discovered that a few of the photos weren't readable. This wasn't a big deal (the photos I cared most about were fine), but it definitely taught me to be less careless with floppies. My backpack has dozens of tiny magnets in it and I struggled to find a spot far enough away from all of them!
Mia recommended I use ddrescue to try to recover parts of the images. It ended up not giving me anything more than I got from copying files over, but was interesting to learn. I could definitely see it coming in handy in the future.
sudo ddrescue /dev/sda hdimage mapfilesudo mkdir /tmp/hdimagesudo mount -o loop hdimage /tmp/hdimagecp /tmp/hdimage/* .sudo umount /tmp/hdimage
To reformat the disks, I used a tool called ufiformat to re-lay the tracks and then used the Mavica's built-in disk format tool to recreate the filesystem.
sudo ufiformat /dev/sda
Link to this section More to come
Thus far I'm really enjoying shooting on the Mavica! Limiting myself to a specific number of shots per disk helps me be more thoughtful than with a modern digital camera, but unlike with film, if I take a bad shot I can just delete the file -- I haven't wasted anything.
Dealing with floppy disks as a medium is much more fun and less stressful than I anticipated! The disks themselves are cheap, devices for reading and writing them are cheap, software support is quite good even on modern machines, and with a little care they're easy enough to keep in working order.
I've been in a bit of a lull with photography lately, but I think I might've found something to get me back into it!