Friend wants to sell a camera.. Is it good?

[Y4J]

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/FD91/FD91A.HTM

My friend wants to sell me a Sony Mavica camera. I don't know a ton about these cameras so I was hoping you guys could give me an insight on it.

Thanks

[zrfraser]

well if its the one in the link then I would stay away. I know megapixels don't mean a whole lot in the outcome of a picture, but it says it has less than a megapixel, my camera phone has about the same amount of resolution. It uses floppy disks for the storage medium and floppies are now obsolete. Finding them now is like finding carbon paper (very hard). Computers now don't even have floppy drives on them anymore, its a dead technology. I used a mavica this last weekend at a birthday party, but it used CD-RW's as the storage medium and it took fairly decent pics.

If the price was fairly low as in less than $50 then I might buy it to play around with, but it would be pointless for me to do so, because my computer doesn't have a floppy disk drive.

Hope this helps,
Z

[spacey]

Ahh the FD91...

I had one of those not to long ago... a year I think. Everything I wanted in a camera, great zoom lens with decent glass, manual-like controls, large comfortable feel, powerful Sony batteries that make others now seem worthless... except unless you changed disks every few shots, it'd be 640x480 at 24-32 shots per disk. If I wanted "high end" I'd shoot 1024x768.

...kinda funny how I dont even except anywork less than 1042x768 now.
Back in it's prime, that was the prosumer thing to have.

That things will get you in the small-and-grainy department. Dont expect any superb shots, even in mid-day sunlight, I still got grainy images. It sucks up light like... well a tele lens - which is what it is. Mine, eventually met it's demise at a defective disk, that could not be removed. Strike that, it was removed, along with the working capability of the flash drive. Recording between shots was slow and NOISY! I shot with it in an old 16mm movie camera blimp (large bag that blocks noise). Later on, tried a Flashpath diskette adaptor, to Memory stick, much slower... very sad.

$300 to fix? I went with a Minolta Z10... much much better, but I do miss 14xIS, and that awesome LCD.

If you're doing thumbnail-work, nothing that requires beauty, go with it. Dont pay over 100, otherwise you can get a decent camera, a little less lens power but magnitudes of image quality over the ole' 91.

The newer miniCD based Mavica's are decent, but I dont like the confusion in the CD/R CD/RW work... too much thought for me (as opposed to flash memory). Convinevnce, yeah but you give up size and space. (CD300, CD500)