SEAArch – The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

I’m sure, in a couple of thousand years from now, when archaeologists from the future dig up our remains, they will rank this piece of technology as “pretty darn rare”. What makes this camera so special? In an era of compact flash cards, SD cards and even mini and micro SD cards, can you guess what kind of storage media this Early Digital Period camera uses? Answers after the jump!

Stumped? Here’s a little hint:

Yes! It’s a 3 1/2″ floppy disk! The science officer at the archaeology centre showed me one of the earliest digital cameras they had, still in pretty good condition too – I suppose it deserves its own display cabinet. I did a little digging and found out that the Sony Mavica was the first commercially available line of electronic cameras. This particular model was a MVC-FD75, released not too long ago in 2001. A disk like this could store about 45 shots, which is still better than the conventional 36-exposure 35mm film. Of course, the 570×490 pixel resolution is pretty pants by today’s standards – a lot worse than what mobile phone cameras can produce these days.

I can’t imagine going out to the field carrying boxes of diskettes, but apparently that’s what they did. But it’s amazing to see that the technology for digital cameras and recording has changed so much in just eight years. I shudder to think what my camera and memory cards will look like, 10 years from now when I’m looking back at this very post. Perhaps by then they’d manage to pack terrabytes of data into a nano-SD card. I’d sneeze and inadvertently destroy my life’s worth of backups.

Tags: digital storage media, floppy disk, Sony Mavica

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