jacobblogs

Tag: hiking

  • Sony Mavica – a floppy disk camera

    I’ve been into “vintage” digital cameras for a while (vintage meaning roughly pre-2008, at least for most electronics). This is the camera that sparked my interest in the first place: a Sony Mavica FD75 that I found for $15 at a local thrift store.

    From 2001, this oddly-shaped camera is a product of the early era of digital cameras, when the much-smaller digital sensors (compared to film) meant designers could experiment with new form factors – in this case, putting the lens/sensor in the top corner of the camera body.

    The unique thing about this camera though isn’t how it looks – it’s how it stores photos. This camera has a floppy drive built in, and it takes regular old 3.5″ floppy disks. This seems odd, but was actually a really good move for Sony. Flash memory was expensive and new, and required dedicated readers, which made the already high barrier to digital photography higher. But almost everyone had a floppy drive on their home computer, and dozens of floppy disks lying around.

    Each floppy disk holds 1.44MB of data, which translates to about 17 photos in the high-quality setting, probably about 20-24 in normal quality – pretty comparable to film, which held about 24-36 shots per roll.

    I like using this camera a lot – it has fun little sounds, lots of buttons on the back, and it feels tactile to use in a way shooting with a smartphone doesn’t. The bloops and beeps it makes (characteristic of these early 2000’s Sony cameras) makes taking pictures almost feel like a game. Each picture takes a few seconds to save, accompanied by a little animation on-screen while the internal drive grinds and clunks as it writes the data.

    So – how do the photos look? Well, to cut down on cost, they used a sensor that only supports a resolution of 640×480 pixels. To be fair, that’s standard resolution, and most computer monitors’ maximum back in 2001. Nowadays though, they look pretty pixelated.

    Marys Peak.

    Depending on what size screen you’re looking at these on, they might actually look fine – especially if you’re viewing this page on a smartphone.

    The view from Chip Ross Park.

    The camera has a couple of picture modes – the photo above was taken in “Solarize” – which simplifies the color palette to fewer colors, like computers from the 80’s and early 90’s sometimes were.

    Another photo taken with the solarize effect.

    Despite the tiny sensor size and minimal dynamic range, I managed to get some decent photos.

    The 10x optical zoom makes this camera a lot more versatile than it otherwise would be, and it’s surprisingly decent at focusing.

    This photo was taken at 10x zoom. It’s hard sometimes to tell if it didn’t focus, or if the photo is just so low-quality that it’s that blurry.

    This photo shows something really interesting – notice the diamond shaped bokeh (the blurs of light in the background) – this indicates that the aperture in the lens (the hole that varies in size to let in more or less light) is a square shape (or diamond if you wish) – another cost-cutting measure. This would usually be pretty undesirable, but I really like the effect here. Portraits with this would be fun.

    This car would have been much newer when this camera first came out.
    Another view of Marys Peak, the tallest peak in the Oregon Coastal Range.
    Despite the fuzziness, this camera actually does really well with exposure, white balance, and colors.

    Believe it or not, this is actually not the worst digital camera I’ve used! That award would go to the GameBoy Camera. It isn’t even the second worst! That’s a tiny old Vivitar camera that was just awful.

    All for now!

  • Tokyo, Japan: 4/27 (and 4/28?)

    Oh, what a day! Today didn’t start till it nearly ended – I spent most of the day just relaxing at the guesthouse (which was somewhat forced – my wallet had been misplaced the day before, and it wasn’t found until it was a little late to head to the flea market I had originally planned to go to.)

    So instead, I blogged, chatted with folks at the hostel, and relaxed.

    But!

    In the evening, a large group of us (18 people) left the hostel to go to a Korean Barbecue place with all-you-can drink lemon sours.

    The Korean barbecue place
    Korean barbecue is mostly meat – brought raw to the table, and cooked over a small gas grill to your preferred level.
    One of the meats I had was a beef tongue with lemon slices, and then some seasoned guts.
    This was vanilla ice cream with a pomegranate syrup? It was almost a vinaigrette.
    One of the other people from the guesthouse wanted to try my camera!

    After the barbecue, we ran across someone with a guitar jamming out next to the train station. Several people ended up dancing while the rest of us watched in a circle, and at the end we clapped and left him a few tips. (Sadly, I did not get a photo of this!)

    Then, we navigated all 18 of us back to the guesthouse through two train stops. For some reason, the Korean Barbecue place only gave us one check, not split by tables (for about $400 USD) – so we spent the next hour and a half trying to decipher the Japanese receipt and figuring out who needed to pay how much. After much ado, we ended up just splitting everything evenly (except for the people who didn’t have a lot). The guy who paid was also american, so I acted as a bank and took some of the cash and sent him money via Venmo. Now I have spending cash for the rest of the trip!

    On the way back we had ran across a couple of Japanese locals who’d just left a bar, and they convinced a number of our group to join them for karaoke after the payment sorting out had happened.

    I did not go back out, but instead stayed back and kept chatting with one of the other guests. We lost track of time as we chatted, until the other group came back from Karaoke . . . At 4:30 AM 😅

    Then of course, we had to chat with the folks who’d come back for a while, and then by the end of that, the sun had begun to rise. At that point, it looked nice outside, and we were already not going to get good sleep – so we just headed out to the quiet morning streets, grabbed a coffee at 7-11, and meandered around the quiet neighborhood as the sun rose.

    Olympus C4100
    We watched this cat for a while, it watched us.
    The weathered paint here looked cool. This photo somehow almost looks like a miniature scene to me.
    I was told that the common use of tiles has to do with earthquake resistance?
    Olympus C4100

    Finally at around 10AM, I ended up heading to bed – and now after 8 hours of sleeping (I woke up at 6PM), I’m here chilling and writing this post. I’ll (in theory) go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour! I have to, because I check out of this guesthouse tomorrow at 10 AM. I’ll be back to this same guesthouse in a few days – I wanted to extend my stay for the rest of the trip, but the next two days are booked out – so I’ll be staying in another guesthouse for two nights before coming back for the rest of my trip.

    All for now! 🙂