Random object: Sony Mavica MVC-FD73

Don't copy that floppy, or why our views of technological progress are not always rooted in reality.

One dubious perk of growing up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain is that I lived through more than a fair share of rapid technological shifts. In the late 1980s, all we had at home was a black-and-white vacuum-tube TV. The golden era of VHS came and went in an instant; a decade later, I was catching up on Western shows on a computer screen.

Along the way, I learned that new technologies tend to prevail even if they are inferior in the eyes of the pros. In a 2022 article on vacuum tubes, I remarked that early transistors performed worse than the tubes — and barely competed on size. The only thing that mattered was that the new tech was cheaper to make and needed less power to operate.

Another good example comes from the world of photography: digital cameras killed film long before they could compete on quality! The technology mainstream in the 1990s; the first prosumer dSLRs that could match the resolution and the dynamic range of 35mm negatives did not materialize until circa 2005.

For years, the market was dominated by products such as Sony Mavica MVC-FD73 — a floppy-disk camera that sported a 640x480 CCD sensor and stored JPEG files at an appalling quality setting of 50%:

Sony Mavica MVC-FD73, next to a box of 3.5” floppies. By author.

The camera wasn’t an early proof-of-concept; the model was selling like hot cakes in 1999 at an MSRP of $599 — or about $1,150 when adjusted for inflation.

To illustrate how it performed, I captured a reference shot of a wooden duck with a modern mirrorless camera (Canon R5 Mark II). The quality is a tad better than what you’d expect from scanned 35mm film, but not dramatically so:

Reference duck, shot with Canon R5 Mark II.

In contrast, here’s the same scene captured by MVC-FD73. Even during the day, the camera is struggling indoors due to insufficient ambient light:

Reference duck, Sony Mavica MVC-FD73.

With a pair of added studio lights, we get this result from Canon:

Well-lit reference duck, R5 Mark II.

…and here’s the blurry, pixelated mess produced by Mavica:

Well-lit reference duck, MVC-FD73.

The examples aren’t cherry-picked; to make things truly awful, all you needed to do is find some point lights. In such a setting, the limitations of the CCD readout process produced nasty, vertical banding artifacts:

Antler lights, Sony Mavica MVC-FD73.

In the end, image quality mattered to a handful of pros; the market at large cared mostly about convenience. I’m sure this holds some lessons for the debates we’re having about cutting-edge tech today.

👉 For an essay on photography, click here.