Please note! This article is based on the ownership of a Sony Mavica FD91 digital camera and observations made while owning this particular camera. It is not an endorsement or condemnation of this camera model. You shouldn't read too much into the report if you are considering buying this camera. We feel that any camera would have good points and bad points and if this article were based on a different camera, it would still read somewhat the same.
The purpose of this article is to share insight gained during the first 3 months of ownership and use of this camera. Pay attention to seemingly insignificant details that help define the experience of owning this digital camera. It is in this respect that your experience may be somewhat similar. Sharing this experience may help you understand life with a digital camera better.
Why Sony Mavica FD91?
One of the reasons for selecting the Mavica FD91 was for the potential of learning digital photography. The ease of use and ability to produce pictures without a huge investment was a critical factor in the choice. The use of floppy disks brings a system with very low digital film costs eliminating the purchase of flash cards and other expensive forms of storage. Although they are better than the floppies, they are expensive. Also, there is a fear that they may be unusable when purchasing the next digital camera. One objective was to keep the cost of this learning experience as low as possible.
The main attraction of this camera is the extremely long zoom lens. This was considered very important because a zoom lens allows you to compose the most appropriate picture in the field. This eliminates or reduces the need to crop pictures in Photoshop. When you do so, you reduce the resolution of the image. Wouldn't it be better to zoom in and get the full resolution on the subject you want? The zoom lens has proven to be extremely valuable and well worth the extra money over other cameras with narrow or even no zoom.
The resolution of 1024x768 is not spectacular but it is more than ample for the web work we do on theVirtual Graphic Artist Webzine. If we were to take pictures for publication or even for print output, another camera may have been the choice. When selecting a digital camera you must understand fully the production system. Then select a camera that will give you the required images. In our case the Sony is acceptable, in your case it may not be and you must select something different.
On the down side, the Sony is actually a "still video camera" for it shares a lot of technology with the Sony camcorders. Using it is something like a cross between a camcorder and a traditional still camera. The pictures with this camera all have blown highlights and this makes a lot of images unusable and a frustration in the field to minimize blown highlights. But from a learning experience, dealing with the blown highlights has led to a hightened awareness of composition and and understanding of camera settings and adjustments that may not otherwise have seemed necessary. If controlled, the camera can produce excellent pictures. You just have to learn to be conscious of the problem. Do other cameras suffer the same problem? We cannot tell but suspect that this is a natural part of photography in the field. After all, who hasn't accidentally produced a film image that didn't have washed out highlights?
In all, the Sony FD91 is an excellent camera for producing web graphics and medium resolution pictures that could be printed in small sizes (such as real estate or used car ads) where the reproduction size is small. It would also be excellent for presentations and archival work with excellent on-screen results.
What have we been doing?Everyone who buys a digital camera will have to go through an exploratory period to learn what the camera can and cannot do. Simply take pictures and analyze them noting problems. Give a lot of thought to understand the problem and how you might be able to solve it. Reading the manual is a great help and gives a lot of information now that you have some idea what they are talking about and what you need to solve. There are answers available in the manual and you will recognize them. Then return to the field and attempt to take the same type of picture producing perfect images. Slowly you will begin to build up a base of tricks and techniques for handling various problem scenes. When you can recognize the problems and take corrective action in the field you have "arrived"!
Living in the Massachusetts Berkshires, nature scenes and images became the subject of most of the pictures. Living within walking distance of a state park with a nice waterfall and streams also helps. For those of you living in a city, buildings and architectural details will probably be your subjects.
As of this writing there have been over 1,200 pictures taken and saved. Not very many were discarded. Each image is opened in Photoshop and adjustments were made. The result is an understanding that the digital image can be viewed as a source image ready to be processed and corrected to its final stage in Photoshop. On occasion there have been images that needed no adjustments in Photoshop. Many that were adjusted really weren't that much better than the original. But for the experience, there have been some trouble images that were exposed producing very dark pictures to minimize blown highlights. These are usually corrected in Photoshop producing excellent images.
Occasionally the old pictures are viewed on screen. It is interesting to note the progress made during the three months, how some earlier pictures could have been improved, and how later pictures show even more advanced problems that were overlooked in earlier shots (too busy worrying about other problems!).
At first the resolution was set to 640x480 which would allow for up to 16 images per floppy but usually only 11. Within a short time the resolution was changed to the high 1024x768 and has remained there ever since. This gives more pixels to work with during retouching which may allow for better control and adjustment. At 1024x768 the floppy holds between 4 and 9 with usually 5.
The quality setting is always at Fine, the better choice for compression. The camera shows enough JPEG damage at the Fine setting so it is not advised to use the standard setting. You will get more pictures on a floppy but they will be noticeable worse. Images can also be saved uncompressed but that is only for the 640x480 resolution. A single 1024x768 uncompressed will not fit on a floppy and therefore is not even available as an option.
Photo sessions generally include two pocketfuls of disks and a charged battery. This allows for about 60-90 pictures and about 60 minutes of camera time. Once a disk is filled it is placed into a third pocket (keep them organized!). Unless a number of shots are to be taken in a short period of time, the camera is turned off after saving the image.
Dealing with Consumables: Batteries
One battery isn't quite enough! This is a problem with all digital cameras. Since digital cameras are actually small handheld computers they do consume a bit of electricity, supplied by battery power. The Sony uses what they call an Info-Lithium battery which is rechargeable. The camera also reports the amount of remaining power in minutes but that should only be used as a rough guide. Using the flash, leaving the camera on for extended periods of time and, obviously, taking a lot of pictures will use the battery very fast.
A recharged battery usually shows 83 minutes of life remaining. As you use the camera, this number is reduced until somewhere around 25 minutes when a low battery warning is flashed on your viewfinder. It is estimated that at about 20 minutes remaining the camera simply stops operating and will shut itself off. At this point you cannot take any more pictures. But you were warned, the low battery flasher will allow for about a half dozen more pictures.
Recharging the battery is very simple and foolproof. It generally takes between 1 and 2 hours to recharge the battery which can be left unattended. The charging light will go out when it is finished. Overcharging does not seem to be a problem but it doesn't increase the battery life either. On this camera, 83 minutes is all it's going to do. Another handy feature is that the battery does not have to be fully discharged before recharging. It is possible to "top off" the battery making it fully charged for the next session. For added convenience in recharging, consider purchasing an inverter from Radio Shack which will allow you to charge your battery in your car as you travel between photo stops. The cost of the inverter is slightly more than purchasing a second battery. For the ultimate, purchase both a spare battery and an inverter. Recharge one while using the other, even if you are on the road. Before doing so, please run some experiments to see if the inverter won't discharge your car batter too much! Although the charger doesn't draw much current, the inverter might.
Dealing with Consumables: Floppy Disks
Sorry, but from the very beginning we had no intentions of using expensive premium floppy disks. The disks can be just about any ordinary double density floppy disks. The last purchase was a box of 50 with a nice rebate bring the cost to under $4.00.
Disks are prone to failure. Occasionally an image is not recorded properly to the floppy and cannot be opened on the computer. This has happened at about the rate of 2-5 images per hundred. Eventually the disk will become corrupted and should be reformatted in a PC computer. Experience with reformatting in a Mac has not been as successful as the PC. When reformatting, carefully note the results of the format which will report the size of the disk and the amount of available space. Make sure that both numbers are the same. If the two numbers do not agree, throw the disk away! If you use the disk, the camera may save pictures to corrupted parts of the disk; an image that can never be opened. In the field you will think you have a great shot but when you get back to the computer you're going to be surprised! It is suspected that the camera does not do a verify when saving the pictures to the floppy. This may be a tactic to speed up the camera since you cannot use it when it is busy recording to floppy.
But disks are not foolproof. They are subject to rough service taking them where no disk was ever intended to go. Consider that you should carry at least 15 disks at a time and double if you have two batteries. They can carried in pockets, pouches, pocketbooks or whatever carrying/storage system you can devise. The tabs may be damaged during this rough handling although we haven't lost one this way yet. If you do have a disk with a damaged or bent flap, rip off the sliding cover and copy the pictures to your computer. Then discard the disk. Floppies should work without the sliding cover but only as an emergency. Do not put a damaged disk into your drive because you may not be able to get it out without damaging your floppy drive.
We have only rarely had a "Disk Error" problem with a disk. The camera chimes, "Disk Error" is flashed on the viewer screen and you replace the disk. Think of it this way. If the camera tells you the disk is dead you can at least use another disk and take the pictures again. It is the problem with files that won't open on the computer that you cannot return to the field and try again!
We have found that occasional reformatting making sure the entire disk is formatted saves a lot of problems and has reduced the unopenable pictures to almost nothing. A disk that has an unopenable image is immediately reformatted. With disks that have functioned properly, the images are deleted from the disk. As rough guideline, expect to reformat the disk after every couple of uses. It only takes a minute but will take a lot longer to go back someplace and take the picture again!With these floppy disk cameras from Sony you should consider that management of the disks is a chore that should be considered as part of the overall maintenance of your digital photography system. With traditional film, it is like one of those annoying chores like mixing developer or driving to the drugstore to drop off or pick up pictures. It's just something you have to give time and effort to. Under no circumstances should you consider them disposable, but if they give you trouble, throw them away!
Problems with the camera
Although we have experienced problems with the camera, it should not be considered the result of a poor product. In this section difficulties noticed with the camera are discussed, especially tactics for dealing with them. No problem with this camera is considered so serious that would render it unusable. Nor is this any indication that any other brand wouldn't have its own share of difficulties that would have to be dealt with. It's just that you should be aware of these problems. Read on.
We have noticed that it is difficult to produce perfect pictures directly from the camera. Although it is possible to use Automatic (the camera is always in automatic mode; it can't be turned off but it can be overridden if and when necessary) for all your pictures and produce acceptable results, we are striving to develop the skills to take artistically appealing and technically perfect pictures. Many pictures taken with automatic settings can be altered in Photoshop to produce very pleasing results.
About the most serious problem is that of blown highlights. Objects that face the sun or receive direct reflections from the sun are prone to washout. This is when entire areas of a light object are rendered as pure white. All pixels are the same and therefore carry no image detail. When viewing the picture all that is seen is a glob of white. No image, no detail and it ruins the picture. Furthermore, blown highlights are almost impossible to fix in Photoshop because there is no digital information to work with. It is for this reason that the first retouching task be to evaluate the histogram. Look for the number of pixels of pure white (level #255 and the next two, 244 and 243, which make up the first 1% of your image density). If there are a lot of pixels on these levels, check to see where they are in the picture. If they are scattered around the picture is usable because they are grouped with near highlight details. If they are clumped together, the image is useless. Other retouching techniques may be used to salvage the picture but that is time consuming and not always convincing.
To solve the blown highlights, careful work in the field is necessary. First, recognize that the picture you are about to take may lose highlights. If so, darken the image to try and turn them into near highlights (which you can easily work with). The problem here is that the exposure controls on the Sony work more to darken the shadows having a lot more effect than on the highlights. There doesn't appear to be any setting that will adjust the highlight. Is it just this particular camera or all the Sony cameras do it?
Another solution is to work in manual mode. Try working with shutter speed or f-stop and raise or lower the setting until the highlights are not too light and the shadows are not too dark. Watch the viewfinder preview as your guide and learn to recognize the density of the highlight. On this camera, for some reason, the actual image is lighter than the preview. Thus, a somewhat darker preview image is required than you may think. It's all in getting used to the camera.
Another tactic is the very basic concept of photography to keep the sun to your back. Even 90 degrees off the direction of the sun has created problems. Watch out for patches of sunlight that affect the automatic exposure setting. Using the Spot Meter feature works quite nicely but your composition has to be altered so that a balance of light and dark appear in the tiny rectangle but you can control the exposure better. This trick works quite well with panoramas where the sky is rendered as white instead of blue. If you set the sky to a nice blue, the trees are filled in solid black! It has often proven to be a difficult balance to achieve and quite the challenge in the field. But after all, this is the skill of being a digital photographer!
Another problem with the camera is that it seems to oversharpen the image. No control or setting has been found for this problem. This is not JPEG damage, this is more the result of "blooming" where strong contrast breaks spill over into surrounding pixels making them lighter and ruining the pleasing contrast. To solve this, the camera sharpens the image. But the problem is that sometimes there is too much sharpening. For example, pebbles on a beach now look like tiny donuts. The worst is the border between sky and trees. There is an oversharpened fringe that is very noticeable. Tedious retouching is about the only solution to this problem that has been found to date.
The Sony cameras are not known for working well in low levels of light. In shadow areas there is often evidence of "video noise", pixels that are often red and sprinkled throughout the shadow area. Instead of a nice dense black there appears a kind of grainy look. A lot of work has been done to figure out this problem and some sophisticated Photoshop techniques can be applied to minimize the problem. Unfortunately, nothing has been found to eliminate it. Many nice pictures were discarded simply because of video noise in the picture.
As for the design of the camera itself, it is generally ergonomically comfortable. When working in automatic mode, it is a pleasure to use. But when working with settings and adjustments, controls are often tiny buttons that are hard to reach when holding the camera to your face. Often times it is necessary to hold the camera away from you so that you can see the desired button and then return it to your eye where you can see the result of your adjustments. The menu button, a round circle with five possible actions (one for each compass point and the center that serves as an "enter" key) takes a bit getting used to. An annoyance is the verify choices that you have to make. To reformat a disk requires a lot of careful pushing of this round button. To delete a picture is very inconvenient because you first have to leave "still" mode and change to "play" mode where there is a different set of menu options. Then you must return to "Still" in order to take the picture again.Are other cameras this tedious in their location of settings and adjustments? The Sony, similar to camcorders, have tiny buttons scattered in places where you might not accidentally touch them. But as settings you may wish to occasionally use, it renders the camera difficult and tedious. Many old film cameras would place settings and adjustments in places that can easily be reached while holding the camera in a position to look through the viewfinder.
Although this may seem like a petty complaint, when you are in the field striving to capture that magic moment, these little annoyances can be enough to slow you down quite a bit. Enough to lose the opportunity for some interesting pictures or enough to correct possible problems such as blown highlights.
In all, the Sony is an automatic camera and a chore to override. Traditional film photographers value the opportunity to make their own choices of settings. After all, each view through your viewfinder presents a unique photographic challenge. Auto is very nice but not always the best creative or technical choice.
The computer connection
A computer is an integral part of a digital imaging system and in our experience we have made the computer an integral part of the image processing system. Here's how it works. The camera is simply the image capture system (parallel to a scanner) feeding input images into Photoshop for image manipulation. With Photoshop a wide variety of tricks and tactics can be used to fix a picture, salvage it or even enhance it beyond what was possible in the field. Therefore, the system dictates that the camera produces "input" into a digital manipulation system rather than "final pictures".
But working on the computer can be time consuming. It often takes longer to adjust the picture on computer than it did to actually set up and compose in the field. It takes time to load the picture, set and adjust the image and wait for processing. Much of the task is in decision making to figure out what to do with the image to make it better. Not all images need adjustment. Another large group of images only need minor adjustments. The bulk of the images are acceptable and the work on the computer only makes them better. There is, unfortunately, a small percentage of images that simply cannot be fixed or retouched. Most of these suffer from blown highlights or ultra dark shadows (a field attempt to minimize blown highlights). Before you consider this a serious issue, consider how many pictures are discarded from a roll of conventional film. Although the imaging is different, the results are the same. Some pictures simply don't make it. The advantage of digital is that some average shots have been turned into spectacular ones with a little Photoshop magic.
A serious problem that has been encountered is the problem of defining the output. Just what is a good picture? Just how saturated should the colors be? How contrasty? How bright? Should there be a complete tonal range from highlight to shadow? These are some of the issues that have developed and are being worked on both in the field and in Photoshop. It is essential that you have a concept of what you want to end up with as you work. You must know that your adjustments are bringing you toward your objective. Otherwise your efforts may be wasted by the indecision and uncertainty while you work. In Photoshop a procedure for adjusting a picture involves a number of steps using different tools and techniques. You have to be able to evaluate each step along the way and this is not as easy as you may think. Furthermore, you should realize that each image is unique presenting its own challenge. It is not possible to develop an Action sequence that with one mouse click your image will be processed. Not only are the settings different for each picture, the tools you may or may not use are also potentially different. The skill is in evaluating the input picture and determining what that picture needs. Then, as you proceed, make sure you're heading in the right direction.
The final Photoshop consideration is your knowledge of the program. You must know what each and every tool could do for your image. A knowledge of Photoshop must involve a thorough understanding of the limits and extents of each and every tool. You have to be able to look at the picture and know whether the tool will fix it or not. Photoshop seems to have the best assortment of tools with the greatest range of adjustment and especially the widest range of control of the application of the tool than other image assembly program. There are simply things you can do in Photoshop that cannot be done in other programs. Do you need these tools? It has been found that because of the uniqueness that an image may present having more tools brings a lot more potential solutions. Do you absolutely need Photoshop? No. And if you don't have it, you probably don't even know what you're missing and will use the capabilities of whatever program you have to get the best possible results from that program. As long as the results are in your opinion "stunning" or "spectacular" then your program is delivering more than adequate results. You only need better when that program is not delivering the results you want or need.
Our last argument to discuss is that of the ethics of photo retouching. Whenever you make adjustments, especially editing adjustments on a picture you are altering the reality of the original scene. Whenever you alter the contrast or colors beyond what they are in real life you are deceiving your viewer. Give this a lot of thought, especially if your images are reproduced in newspapers. A retouching procedure that is aimed to use computer magic to correct an image to the best possible look that would have matched the original scene may be the most technically excusable. Doing simple retouching that gets rid of annoyances of enhances the picture slightly may not be that undesirable. Doing any more borders on unethically presenting or altering reality.
But if you think you are an artist you definitely have artistic freedom to do whatever you like with your images. For those of you who have not played with Photoshop it can be incredibly interesting and fun. So if you pictures are labeled as retouched or enhanced and not presented as reality, go forth and have fun! This is what digital photography is all about!
Conclusion: How long is this going to take?
As of this writing we have accumulated over 1200 pictures and still think this is in the learning stage. There is so much to learn, so much to explore. Numerous experiments have been conducted simply by walking out the back door, shoot some pictures, return to the computer and make an evaluation of the results. Then go back out and try again. (Note: these pictures are not saved.)The Sony Mavica FD91 has proven itself to be quite a challenge and a wonderful camera for learning about digital photography. It presents a wide variety of challenges and that certainly is a lot of fun. Learning how to take a picture, what settings and adjustments to use and the management of the battery and disks is an enjoyable challenge.
But there is still one more dimension. What about the quality of the compositions? Although they may be technically perfect pictures, are they nice pictures? Perhaps the greatest joy of working with a camera is the ability to explore the concepts of visual expression. Learning to take nice pictures is definitely a part of the experience and working with a digital camera is very inexpensive. Having virtually no cost for Consumables makes it pleasant whenever the mood strikes to go out and work; or is that to go out and have fun!
