My parents had a Sony Mavica FD-91 for a conservation project in Panama in 1999 or 2000... the great joke was that there was an image quality setting where a single picture took more space than was currently available on the storage medium — floppy drives. At normal image quality, a single floppy held eight photos.
The amount of technological improvement and decrease in cost between that camera and a 2003 Olympus point-and-shoot was stunning. I don't think I've seen hardware advance that quickly at any other point, except maybe PDAs around 2003 or smartphones around the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
Sony produced a device that let you put a memory stick into the floppy drive. It had 3 coin cells to let it work as an emulator for the floppy disk for reads and writes. Seriously.
Hah, I hadn't seen that. It reminds me of those "cassette tapes" that came out around when CD's first came out, so you could play your portable CD through the car stereo system which only had cassette tapes at the time. My friend had one and I thought it was the funniest thing - a cassette tape with a 3 foot wire coming out of it to attach to the stereo minijack output of the cd player.
I worked in a factory that had one of these. We weren't allowed to bring our own cameras in, but it was often necessary to photograph things for documentation. So you'd go check out the camera and the floppy disk, both of which had asset tags and had to be accounted for.
The bio chip Apple created for face unlocking/motion tracking is the same tech that MS used on the Xbox Kinect 360 in 2010, only 8 years ago (iPhone X shipped in 2017 with it), shrunk down to a very small single chip package size. Apple bought the Israeli company, PrimeSense, that MS was licensing the tech from.
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My parents had a Sony Mavica FD-91 for a conservation project in Panama in 1999 or 2000... the great joke was that there was an image quality setting where a single picture took more space than was currently available on the storage medium — floppy drives. At normal image quality, a single floppy held eight photos.
The amount of technological improvement and decrease in cost between that camera and a 2003 Olympus point-and-shoot was stunning. I don't think I've seen hardware advance that quickly at any other point, except maybe PDAs around 2003 or smartphones around the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.
A Sony floppy disk camera was the first digital camera I used too in 1998.
The floppy disk storage was amazing, so convenient. I seem to remember the disk fitting about the same number of images as a roll of film, 24 or so.
I still have the files, they are 30k to 60k jpegs at 640x480 pixels!
It was basically a Sony video camera with the nice 10x optical zoom without the tape and with a floppy instead.
It looked something like this (may not be the exact model).
http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP152.htm
Sony produced a device that let you put a memory stick into the floppy drive. It had 3 coin cells to let it work as an emulator for the floppy disk for reads and writes. Seriously.
Hah, I hadn't seen that. It reminds me of those "cassette tapes" that came out around when CD's first came out, so you could play your portable CD through the car stereo system which only had cassette tapes at the time. My friend had one and I thought it was the funniest thing - a cassette tape with a 3 foot wire coming out of it to attach to the stereo minijack output of the cd player.
https://obsoletemedia.org/sony-memory-stick-floppy-disk-adap...
I worked in a factory that had one of these. We weren't allowed to bring our own cameras in, but it was often necessary to photograph things for documentation. So you'd go check out the camera and the floppy disk, both of which had asset tags and had to be accounted for.
The bio chip Apple created for face unlocking/motion tracking is the same tech that MS used on the Xbox Kinect 360 in 2010, only 8 years ago (iPhone X shipped in 2017 with it), shrunk down to a very small single chip package size. Apple bought the Israeli company, PrimeSense, that MS was licensing the tech from.
that was a fun machine!