Rating: 
Summary: Leave your 35mm at home
Review: The MVC-FD88 is the best camera I've ever used. We've now left behind our old 35mm camera in favor of using this exclusively. The camera takes excellent, very high quality pictures, indistinguishable from a good quality 35mm. Resolution is excellent, pictures taken both in low light and bright light show good color results. Used with Microsoft's Picture It software, this is a top line camera. On our recent trip, we took over 300 pictures using this camera. I've never gotten such a high percentage of shots that were excellent before.Some important points: Use of the floppies for storage is perfect. We took twice as many as we expected to use on an overseas trip recently and began to run out. No problem, the nearest computer store had plenty at reasonable prices. The original battery life isn't really sufficient for the heavy user, purchase of the newer longer life battery is a big boost. A UV filter is also a boost just like with a standard 35mm, particularly on very bright days. The LCD is sometimes hard to see in very bright light, a viewfinder for those occasions would help. (However, I find I get better composition with the LCD in general since I can see greater detail.) Storage time on the camera can be somewhat slow when using poor quality floppies. It's worth investing in slightly more expensive, higher quality floppies to ensure the 2 sec recording time. Overall, a definite 5 star camera.
Rating:
Summary: Leave your 35mm at home
Review: The MVC-FD88 is the best camera I've ever used. We've now left behind our old 35mm camera in favor of using this exclusively. The camera takes excellent, very high quality pictures, indistinguishable from a good quality 35mm. Resolution is excellent, pictures taken both in low light and bright light show good color results. Used with Microsoft's Picture It software, this is a top line camera. On our recent trip, we took over 300 pictures using this camera. I've never gotten such a high percentage of shots that were excellent before. Some important points: Use of the floppies for storage is perfect. We took twice as many as we expected to use on an overseas trip recently and began to run out. No problem, the nearest computer store had plenty at reasonable prices. The original battery life isn't really sufficient for the heavy user, purchase of the newer longer life battery is a big boost. A UV filter is also a boost just like with a standard 35mm, particularly on very bright days. The LCD is sometimes hard to see in very bright light, a viewfinder for those occasions would help. (However, I find I get better composition with the LCD in general since I can see greater detail.) Storage time on the camera can be somewhat slow when using poor quality floppies. It's worth investing in slightly more expensive, higher quality floppies to ensure the 2 sec recording time. Overall, a definite 5 star camera.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Camera. Great pictures, easy, and fun to use!
Review: The Sony Mavica FD88 is a terrific digital camera, especially for someone new to the genre and not necessarily extremely Computer literate. It takes great shots and the floppy disk storage medium is very easy to use and download to your PC. While its rated 1.3 million pixels is not as high as some other high level models from other manufacturers, in reality not too many people are going to appreciate much of a difference; the pictures look great, crystal clear, and very professional. Well worth the price.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Camera That is Packed with Features
Review: This camera has a lot going for it. The first picture I took turned out great! The camera is very user friendly which is good because the manual that Sony provides is not very well organized or well written. I find the floppy disk storage to be easy and convenient. The camera allows you to make a copy of the disk right in the camera so you can share copies of photos with friends on the spot. The Mpeg movies are a fun little add on. I am taking the camera to England in April and I think it will be fun to capture little movie clips over there. The rechargeable battery seems to be adequate. I am planning to purchase the more powerful one that provides longer charge. The video and audio cables provided allow easy viewing of the photos on the TV set. The only negatives with the camera are the difficulty holding the view steady when the zoom is on (but no other digital camera maker provides a zoom this powerful) Also, the light that leaks out of the window at the top of the LCD screen. This can be annoying in a dark room. Overall, this camera delivered the features that I was looking for.
Rating:
Summary: Great camera, great picture quality
Review: This is a beautiful camera that takes an awfully good picture. Easy to use, highly recommended. I love everything about it. By the HP Photo Printer with it for especially good shots.
Rating:
Summary: A Long Islanders opinoin!
Review: This is a very good camera to have. We have this camera and it is very good. You can take this on trips with you and you dont need to buy film, because you can just bring some floppy disks, because thats where the camera stores its pictures. Its a very nice camera!
Rating:
Summary: A great camera for anyone to use!
Review: This is my first digital camera, and I am glad that I bought it! It is easy to learn to use, taking me less than 1 hour to become extremely proficient using it. Contrary to other cameras, the included battery has a long life, lasting about 1 1/2 hours. I recommend that you purchase an extra though so that you'll always have an ample supply of power. Another plus with this camera is that the batteries charge quickly, something like 2 hours. Although limited to 1 MB, the 3.5 inch floppy disk storage method is simple and very convenient. Remove the disk from the camera, pop it into your desktop, and then call up the picture. Easy and fast. On the low resolution you can get about 35 pictures to a floppy and about 10 on the highest resolution. Alother fun feature is the TV playback. Just plug the included cable into the audio/video plug in your TV or VCR and then you operate the camera as you would a remote control. Just like a slide show of your own creation on TV. This a really nicxe feature for showing pictures to family and/or company. Overall, this is a nice product and worth the extra money. I am very glad that I got it, and you will too. If your only looking for basic internet picture taking though, this is not for you b/c of the numerous features.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Use of Technology
Review: We bought the Sony MVC-FD88 to share our new son with family 1000 and 2000 miles away. I hope to pay for it by selling duplicate collectibles on eBay. The key reasons we bought this camera: 1. Resolution. When I have shown friends 4x6 pictures, they had no idea it was a digital camera. 2. Easy file transfer. I do not need to crawl under desks to attach download cables to a computer tower. 3. Cost of photo media. [Money] for one digital camera data card versus [money] for 50 diskettes is a no brainer. I can take the disk directly to a store for hard copies. To save hard drive disk space, we leave the photos on the disk. 4. Ease of adjusting camera. This camera is incredibly easy to adjust for outdoors, indoors, low light, and super low light settings. 5. Movies. This camera will make 15 second mpeg movies. A high resolution movie will fill a disk. It takes a long time to email on a 28.8 modem. Fortunately, the family loves receiving the movies. We are very satisfied with our purchase. We have two minor suggestions: 1. Spend [money] on a tripod. Though you think you are holding still, the low light settings pickup small movements. The tripod eliminates this problem. 2. Look carefully at the photo editing software that comes with the camera. ArcSoft Camera Studio does well cropping and resizing pictures. However, it lacks red eye reduction.
Rating:
Summary: Fun Use of Technology
Review: We bought the Sony MVC-FD88 to share our new son with family 1000 and 2000 miles away. I hope to pay for it by selling duplicate collectibles on eBay. The key reasons we bought this camera: 1. Resolution. When I have shown friends 4x6 pictures, they had no idea it was a digital camera. 2. Easy file transfer. I do not need to crawl under desks to attach download cables to a computer tower. 3. Cost of photo media. [Money] for one digital camera data card versus [money] for 50 diskettes is a no brainer. I can take the disk directly to a store for hard copies. To save hard drive disk space, we leave the photos on the disk. 4. Ease of adjusting camera. This camera is incredibly easy to adjust for outdoors, indoors, low light, and super low light settings. 5. Movies. This camera will make 15 second mpeg movies. A high resolution movie will fill a disk. It takes a long time to email on a 28.8 modem. Fortunately, the family loves receiving the movies. We are very satisfied with our purchase. We have two minor suggestions: 1. Spend [money] on a tripod. Though you think you are holding still, the low light settings pickup small movements. The tripod eliminates this problem. 2. Look carefully at the photo editing software that comes with the camera. ArcSoft Camera Studio does well cropping and resizing pictures. However, it lacks red eye reduction.
Rating:
Summary: Easier to share photos with friends and store photos
Review: We bought this and are 100% satisfied. We borrowed ourfriend's MVC-73 and took about 100+ pictures before our MVC-FD88arrived. The thing about this camera is that you don't worry about running out of storage media - just about any store sells floppies and cheaply. And, the secret to getting those great pictures is to take alot of them. We have coworkers who own more than 2 digital cameras made by different manufacturers, that use other storage media, and are still looking for the right combo of features and performance. If we get another camera it will be an upgraded Mavica. If we had bought a camera that used a memory stick, compact flash, smart media card we wouldn't have the hundreds of photos that we have now - (our camera arrived in January 2000). Floppies are so cheap! Sony does it again with ease of use as well. Compared to other cameras, Sony's menu really is intuitive. It just makes sense. If you buy this camera, buy the accessory kit. The battery that comes with the kit is cheper than buying the battery by itself! Tips: Here's the way we use it. We carry about 3-4 floppies on short outings, more on longer outings. Sometimes we carry my notebook. If we run out of floppies, we upload them to the notebook, or on the nearest computer. We leave the default file names alone (mvc-xxxx) serialnumber and place each disk's worth in a folder for that month (2000-03 for march, 2000-04 for april). We then erase and re-use the diskette. Next when we get the chance, we upload our pictures from the notebook or friend's computer onto one of our free photo storage accounts on the web - again leaving the filename as the first part of the description along with an additional description, if we have time. We also download our pictures or copy them off the notebook to our main computer. Then we make backup copies of the folders with the pictures on our main computer's hard drive. So we usually have 3 copies in accessible places - main computer drive, web and CD/Orb. Hard drives do crash so you'll want to keep backup copies on another site or media. When we're out with our camera at friend's homes, sharing pictures is so easy, since we can leave them a copy of our pictures on their computer. (more backups!). I suspect by the end of the year we will have several CDs filled with our pictures taken by this camera. Finally, read the manual so you'll know how to work all the features packed into this camera. END
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