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Comment by veemjeem | Hacker News Reader

I think the most popular digital camera around that time was the the Sony Mavica FD-81. You could insert a normal 3.5" floppy disk into the camera and save pictures directly to it. Our school bought one for $900 and it was shared by the department to take pictures of stuff. The resolution on that thing was really crappy, but I guess nobody cared since our computers were equally crappy at the time. The Mavica came out around late 1998.

I doubt anyone actually owned the Sony Mavica for their own "personal" uses. It ran out of battery after 30 pictures or so, and you needed to carry around a bunch of floppies. My crappy disposable camera could take better pictures than that thing.

I'm not sure if I would consider the 3.5" floppy disk as a "relevant sized mass storage" but 1.4mb was probably pretty big in those days. When I bought windows 95, it came in 28 floppy disks.

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Around 1996-97 Apple sold a digital camera, the QuickCam (and then, IIRC, the QuickCam 500). Steve killed the line when he came back, and (as someone who had access to one at work) all I can say is "good riddance".

The QuickCam was, IIRC, an 0.5 megapixel camera. It had enough on-board non-expandable memory to store 16 full-res or 32 low-res pictures, and an AppleTalk port for squirting them across to a Mac. It was a fixed-focus device with secondary viewfinder glass, no on-board LCD display, and it weighed about 0.5Kg (one of your old-school pounds). It was mostly marketed at estate agents and other professions who needed to snap shots and upload them to a computer frequently; as a consumer device it was a bit crap -- twice the cost of a cheap photo-film SLR and vastly inferior quality.

What made digital cameras practical was cheap expandability (remember when a 16Mb CF card was expensive and bleeding edge?) and digital viewfinder backs. Which didn't really arrive at a consumer-friendly price point until 1999-2000 (I remember paying £700 for a 1.4 megapixel camera with a digital viewfinder circa 1999-ish).

Which in turn tells us why iPhoto didn't come along until the turn of the millennium ...

Apple Quicktake, Logitech QuickCam. I've owned the later and have used both. In retrospect I consider it the early version of instagram. My friends and I would take pictures of ourselves goofing around and upload them to our university webpages or Geocities. All in the same day. The other option was film cameras which could take days or weeks (or years if you lost a canister).

Surely not 3.5" floppies in 1998. 1998 was the year of 100MB zip disks, LS120 supper floppies. This was when everyone already had CD-roms in their PCs and some luck people had CD-writers.

I remember digital cameras of that era writing to mini-CDs. I dont recall ones writing to 3.5" floppies.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Mavica)

> Sony Digital Mavica MVC-FD5 (1997), the first digital camera of the Mavica series.

> The later Digital Mavicas recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market.

[...]

> and a new CD Mavica series — which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.

I still remember the "writing to floppy" animation on the thing. It was a seriously cool bit of kit to use, chuck it in your bag with a box of floppies and you were good to go.

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