Sony FD Mavica MVC-FD100

This camera has driven me nuts for as long as I've had it.

The images are adequate as long as you have plenty of light; the flash doesn't seem to illuminate very well. Videos don't trigger the flash at all, so they end up being dark and blurry except if taken in broad daylight.

I was roped in by the floppy drive because I didn't want to drop several hundred dollars on a camera and still have to buy a Memory Stick. Unfortunately, you can only cram 7 or 8 images of 1024X768 resolution on one floppy; not even on par with a roll of film. This isn't so much a flaw in the camera as it is a limitation of the floppy disk, but my point is that it's not really worth it. The upside is that if someone wants a copy of a picture you just took, you can hand them a floppy right then. Great at geek conventions.

Probably the most maddening thing about this camera is the delay between mashing the button and the picture actually being taken. It can take anywhere from a second to three seconds while the auto-focus blunders about (there is no manual focus), long enough to miss your photo op. I found it impossible to compensate because of the inconsistency of the delay.

Thanks to my experience with this camera, a proprietary battery will always be a showstopper. The battery in this thing is huge and lasts maybe an hour on a charge, and a second battery is expensive ($25-$35 as of this writing, but twice to three times that when the camera was new). The included AC adapter is bulky and takes an hour to get your battery to a full charge. You might as well just plug the thing into the wall while you're using it and get 100% uptime since you'll spend so much time near an outlet anyway. It's AAs for me from now on.

A really bad thing with this camera is the lack of internal memory. Copying photos from one media to another is a pain; impossible if you don't have both types on hand. You're limited to copying the floppy's capacity at a time.

An interesting plus is that if your PC has a TV capture card with RCA jacks, you can use this camera as a webcam. Unfortunately, it's hard to prop the thing up so it's pointing at your face because it's so bulky, and there's no way to turn off the auto time-out feature to keep it from shutting off on you.

The floppy drive is an interesting gimmick, but it multiplies the bulk of an otherwise featureless camera. Unless you and your friends still use floppy disks frequently, don't bother with this camera.