These are pictures taken of and by me. The earlier photos were mostly taken with Dad's Sony Mavica FD-88, the later ones with my own Panasonic PV-SD4090.

I'm quite fond of the Panasonic... it's basically a Mavica on steroids. It uses a 120MB LS-120 "Superdisk" floppy drive for image storage, so it has a 480-image capacity at maximum 1280x960 resolution... and that's just on one disk. I typically carry three or four around. I've never filled one, but you never know when a second disk might come in handy.

The problem with using the LS-120s is that they never caught on even to the extent that Zip disks did. I have an IDE LS-120 drive in angharad, which I got specifically for the purpose of pulling images from my camera, but it's rare that I run across other machines that have LS-120 drives.

The Panasonic partially solves this problem with another neat feature... it's got a USB port on it, too, and rather than just allowing image download over USB the way most USB cameras do, it allows full access to the floppy, which makes it basically a fully functional USB LS-120 drive. You can't boot off it, but you can do just about anything else. The problem there is that it needs a USB port and drivers, and the drivers only exist for Win98 and MacOS Classic. Surprisingly few of my friends and acquaintances have a Win98 machine with USB ports.

It's also capable of using regular 1.44MB 3.5" floppies, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of having the LS-120.

Image quality on the thing is decent... it doesn't handle low-light as well as the Mavica does, but, on the other hand, it has a usable (if slightly blue) flash, unlike the Mavica, which tends to wash out whatever you're taking the picture of with the glare of its thermonuclear flash.

Battery life is the main problem I've had with it... the LCD (which is the only viewfinder) and the LS-120 both consume massive amounts of power, and if I'm using the flash as well, I can kill the battery in a matter of minutes. The battery charger, fortunately, doubles as a power block, so you can plug the camera directly into the wall.