Sample shots, Sony Mavica MVC-FD7

These are a few sample shots that I took with the Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 . I wasn't very careful about controlling conditions, holding the camera steady, etc. These are basically a few snapshots from a stroll around the building.

Overall, the camera is simple to use. Insert a 3.5" floppy, take pictures, stick the floppy into a PC, and copy off the JPEG images.

The MVC-FD7 is essentially a camcorder that writes single jpeg-compressed images to floppy instead of full video to tape. Like camcorders, the images are acquired interlaced. This is a snapshot in "field" mode (e.g. it uses only one half of the interlaced frame. So the camera resampled this image from 640x240 original samples). This is with compression set to "normal", so the full-size (640x480) image is only 31K.

Changing the camera mode to "frame" instead of "field", the camera combines two interlaced fields together. You can see the results of James waving his arms quickly, but you can also see the result of me moving the camera while taking the picture. This seems to suggest that, when hand-holding the camera, you should only use single-field mode.

We turned compression from "normal" to "high" for this image, too. However, the artifacts still look pretty bad. I'm assuming that most of the bandwidth of JPEG coefficients went into coding the differences between even and odd scanlines...

Ok, so this is the same parameters (full-frame, high quality compression), but with the camera sitting still. Much better. :-)

A few indoor photos around the building. (single field, high quality compression)

A few mixed indoor/sunlight photos. (single field, high quality compression)

Without moving the camera, this is the difference between wide-angle and (10X) zoom. (The zooming mechanism is physical, not electronic). (single field, high quality compression)