Brookside Gardens & Sony Mavica 200 Camera

I purchased my first digital camera back in 2001 when the Sony Mavica 200 camera was introduced.  It was an unusual camera in that it had a 3.5" CD that held 177mg as it's storage device.  It was a 2.1 megapixel camera with a super great lens.  You could use rewriteable CDs and that was a great feature for it's time.  Around 155 pictures taken at the highest quality would fit on one CD.  We were planning on going to the Albuquerque Kodak Balloon Fiesta and I wanted something to take the hundreds of photos that would be taken by me out there.

I had researched digital cameras and it was difficult to determine which would suit my purposes and it all boiled down to the Mavica CD 200.  Earlier models used floppy discs, but the storage capacity was so small that they weren't feasible for taking hundreds of pictures.   A photo trip was necessary early on to figure out how to use the camera.  I read up on it's features, how to use the buttons, knobs and such and went to the Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, MD which was near our house at that time.  I tried all the features and immediately went home to check out my work.

Here are some pictures from that first try.  Keep in mind that these pictures were around 900kb and not the huge sized ones you get now from newer cameras.

I still have the camera and it works fine, but the 3.5" CDs aren't readable on my laptop computer now so I only use it occasionally.  My biggest worry when I bought the camera was that the disk drive would fail quickly.  It still does a great job after more than 10,000 photos.  That is quality that is hard to find in cameras in this throw away era that we live in today.

No, I do not want to sell the camera.  It will be a museum piece in a few more years and we can show it on the shelf next to Gerry's first Brownie camera she got by selling Christmas cards back when she was 12 years old.   It still works also, but it is almost impossible to find film for the camera.  Even if the film was available, it would be difficult getting it developed.

Now it is time to put the Christmas decorations back in storage, assuming I can find a place to store them outside in the storage bins.  That may be a major problem since space is in short supply.

 Wish me luck.