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The question is, what possessed famously market-savvy Sony, who
back in the day did more than most to create trends in consumer electronics, to
launch a range of advanced digital still cameras (DSCs), using floppy discs to
store images? 
It’s a long story but the short-ish version begins in the mid
1990s. Digital still cameras were just coming on to the market, and whilst they
were expensive to begin with, prices would fall quite quickly. They were met
with a collective sigh. Film cameras had served us well for more than a
century. The best ones were capable of stunning picture quality, even cheap
ones could take a passable snap in good conditions, and they were mostly very
easy to use. So what was the point of digital cameras? Picture quality was
quite poor on the earliest models, worse even than the cheapest film cameras.
You couldn’t easily handle or share your photographs or even see them properly
unless you had a computer, and the know-how needed to get them from the camera
to a computer.
Whilst all this was happening 3.5-inch floppy discs – the closest
thing to a standard for portable data storage and transfer -- were going into
steep decline. No one much cared; they were horrible, slow, noisy, fragile and
unreliable things. With a capacity of just 1.4Mb they were next to useless and
by the late 1990s they were well on the way to obsolescence, replaced by
solid-state Flash Memory cards and USB Flash Drives. Even Sony got involved and
in 1997 introduced the Memory Stick, a chewing gum sized Flash Memory card,
around a tenth the size with almost ten times the memory capacity of a floppy.
1997 was also the year that Sony announced the Mavica MVC-FD5 and
FD7, the company’s very first digital still cameras (earlier models had all
used analogue video recording systems). It sounded like it was going to be job
done once again for Sony with two cutting-edge technologies coming out at
almost exactly the same time.
The FD5 and FD7 were aimed at tech-wary newcomers to digital
photography. In the late 90s the humble floppy was still the quickest, simplest
and sometimes, the only way to transfer digital data between computers and
devices, and that included normally uncommunicative Windows and Mac PCs and
laptops. Using floppies meant there was no need to mess around with cables,
connectors, special software and the vagaries of operating systems. It was a
no-brainer, almost all computers had floppy drives as standard, in contrast USB
sockets were by no means universal, and memory card readers were confined to a
few top end models.
Everyone knew memory cards would be the way forward for digital
still cameras but in the mid to late 90s confusion reigned. The market was in
the midst of a bitter format war. There were four main contenders, MMC/SD (the
eventual winner), Compact Flash, xD Card, and Smart Media and that was before
Sony belatedly threw their Memory Stick shaped hat into the ring. Digital
photography was in its infancy and it was still anyone’s guess how it would pan
out.
The Mavica MVC-FD7, featured here, suddenly starts make sense.
True, it’s a bit of a lump, and for the same money you could have bought a very
decent SLR camera and lenses, but as an almost pain-free introduction to
digital photography, and a taste of what was to come, it took some beating. The
FD7 is the step-up model from the FD5, sharing the same 0.3 megapixel CCD image
sensor, floppy drive and 2.5 inch LCD screen but with a 10x optical zoom, auto
focus plus a macro setting and a number of automatic exposure modes and
effects. It has two ‘quality’ levels of 640 x 480 and 320 x 240 pixels and
depending on the chosen shooting modes, a standard 1.4Mb floppy could store
between 15 and 40 images. Floppies were cheap and reasonably compact, so
carrying a few spares was no great burden and with a battery giving around 2 –
3 hours of shooting time, it was more than adequate for a day out with the
family. It goes without saying that it is easy to use and it was clearly no
accident that it felt a lot like a camcorder – something Sony were justifiably
good at – rather than a film camera. In fact any who owned a Sony camcorder
would have been able to pick up and use an FD5 or FD7 without bothering to read
the instruction manual.
Sony’s reputation for quality and innovation, plus the camera’s
simplicity and convenience appeared to outweigh the hefty price and apparently
it sold quite well to early adopters. At the time of writing (early 2021)
there’s generally a few on ebay, where this one came from, and prices are not
too scary either. Working Buy-It-Now examples can be found for between £20 and
£50, with a few top-notch ones creeping into three figures. This one was and
exception, it was an auction sale with a starting price of £2.00 and described
as untested, for parts or not working. Serious buyers would have given it a
wide berth but it appeared to be in fairly good condition. I wasn’t
particularly interested, as a source of spare parts it wasn’t promising but I
put in a bid of £5.00, just to get things moving and see what would happen. Not
much, as it turned out. I expected at least a couple of other casual bidders to
weigh in but it never happened.
It was very clean, well looked after and little used. It came with
a battery and carry case but nothing else. Needless to say the battery pack was
as long dead. A replacement battery and suitable charger would cost at least
£25, an expensive gamble if it didn’t work. Annoyingly it didn’t have an
external DC supply socket so I decided to work with what I had.
My inelegant lash-up worked. The only issue after it powered-up
was a warning icon on the screen for the on-board lithium clock battery. The
FD7 is a well-appointed point-and-shoot camera, with a capable 6-mode
auto-exposure system (portrait, landscape, night, sports etc) and enough manual
adjustments to cope with difficult situations and satisfy more able
photographers. There’s also the usual pointless assortment of special effects
(sepia, solarize, B&W etc.), none of which work as well as even the most
basic PC picture editing programs; fiddling with images on a computer, rather
than in-camera also preserves original images. The zoom is silky smooth and the
LCD viewfinder – often a weakness on digital cameras, especially in bright
sunlight – is actually quite bright and useable. And so we come to image
quality. There is no point comparing it with modern digital cameras but
alongside other similarly priced DSCs on sale at the time, it gives a pretty
good account of itself.