Where I work we're considering a few different digital cameras. One is the Mavica FD85. That particular camera uses a floppy drive to store it's pictures. It makes me a little nervous spending $700 on a camera that relies on 1980s technology to store it's pictures. Can anyone who's had some experience with Mavicas that use the floppy drive give me some idea as to the quality? A floppy drive is a rather cheap piece of hardware and in my experience not the most reliable means of storage.

Hey, Claw, I'm not a Sony user; have a Canon S10 and a G1, both of which I really love, especially the latter. However, I have seen my friend's Mavica and the pictures it puts out--they look really good, and he's far from an experienced photographer. My question to you if you're looking to spend that much money, how do all the pictures fit on one floppy? Each of my G1 pictures in raw mode take up over two MB each. For $700, you can get some pretty fancy equipment out there now, even into the three MPixel range-nice if you're going to print stuff out.

I guess that $700 figure is a little off

That's what they're going for at Outpost.com, but on pricewatch I see the same model for less than $500.

Actually I think I'm going to go with one of my other choices which would be either a Nikon Coolpix 800 or 950. They're both 2.1 megapixel and look like really nice cameras. Screw the floppy, I'll just get a USB flash card reader or something .

The FD85 is only a 1.3 megapixel unit. So for the money, either of the Nikons are a better buy. Plus you really can't go wrong with a Nikon as far as cameras go.

[GORDYmac]

Whew! Glad you made the right decision. For anyone else who may be wondering: If you care about image quality, stay away from those floppy-based Mavicas. The JPEG compression is horrible, just horrible, and the floppy convenience isn't worth it.

[doug young]

the nikon coolpix 9** are supposed to be excellent
A lot of Pro Photographers use them as a backup pocket digital or for qtvr panoramas.

Kaidan even make a special tripod mount for this camera, it is so popular for this purpose.
http://www.kaidan.com/products/kiwi9.html

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I've never been wrong, except once when I thought I was wrong, but I wasn't. I was Right.