The Printer With a Floppy Drive! Sony Mavica Printer from 1999
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2024
- Unboxing and testing a late 90s Sony Mavica Printer! Which as the name implies is a photo printer with a floppy disk drive. Just cram a 3.5” diskette full of JPEGs inside, press print, and get photo quality dye sublimated prints! No computer required. Although it does require a TV... and an original PlayStation is nice to have, too.
● LGR links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● An album of the Mavica captures and photos:
imgur.com/a/mp9Q4YI
● Here's a CD-ROM image of the Digital Color Printer Utility:
archive.org/details/fvp1-prin...
● All background music licensed from:
www.epidemicsound.com
00:00 It's a floppy disk printer!
00:44 Sony FD Mavica cameras
01:20 Digital photo prints? How?
01:40 FVP-1 Mavica Printer
02:38 Appeal of a printer for Mavicas
04:04 Sony Video Printers
05:42 Unboxing the FVP-1
06:12 Details of the printer itself
07:07 Color photo paper and cartridge
08:00 Nothing to see without TV!
08:34 The first test print
10:02 Taking pics with a Mavica FD-87
11:15 Printing more photos!
13:38 Testing a downloaded JPEG
14:21 PS1 composite video input
16:31 Duke Nukem Time To Kill
17:59 Viewing video capture photos on PC
18:45 Sony Printer Utility for Windows
20:53 Printing a cherry blossom calendar
21:20 The Mavica Printer is awesome
#LGR #retro #computer #90s #sony - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Making you hook up a TV to see its interface is like a '90s version of making you pair it with your phone and install an app.
Ha! True.
But somehow needing a TV is still the better of the two options...
@@founderio Aye, it is at least future proof from the perspective of not relying on servers and credentials
Although trying to find a new TV with composite in is getting frustratingly difficult. I know, there's plenty of TVs with composite at thrift stores, but not always consistently.
@@AmEv7fam There's endless ways to convert composite video into HDMI though. Everything from simple $10 garbage on Amazon to the expensive converters and scalers popular among the retro gaming community.
Even for today's standards, I could see people enjoying those print photographs. I can't imagine enjoying that quality and immediacy back in the '90s!
Thermal photo printers truly blew my mind as a youngin back then.
I was utterly enamored with those Kodak Picture Kiosks which used very similar printers!
@@LGR As someone who used one of those Mavica when they were new, I think a 1.3 mp, printing 4x6 or 3x5 photos would hold up today.
You can buy battery powered dye sub printers. For example Kodak Mini 2 retro.
Same tech in some current printer systems... Quality had always been good. Think you can even get the paper for these still as the fuji and okympus systems used them and hospitals still use them as do baby scanning photos.
Look into zInk printers. They're pretty much the same thing except portable and modern!
I'm so happy that you don't do youtube shorts
Me too. Give me the long form LGR always!!
yes!
Shorts are for those who just want entertainment, not knowledge
@@jakematic I wouldn't say that, necessarily. Vsauce has done really well with short-form content, all neat and educational!
I think he should at least clip his videos and upload them as shorts. They're good for growing your channel and I want him to have as much success as possible.
One of my first jobs in the game industry was to test games.
This is what we used to take screenshots if you were lucky.
Otherwise, it was a digicam on a tripod aimed at the TV
That's awesome.
That must have been such a fun job!
Aiptek Pwn Cam, lol.
PC didn't have Prnt Screen?
Being able to get clean screenshots from consoles is to me the coolest part.
I'm pretty sure this is how gaming magazines did it in the 90s/00s. Or at least one of the ways they did it
I was thinking the exact same thing, they probably did this or had a pro grade device@@nsf001-3
I have a Roxio video capture device from 2004 that will do the same thing.
@@nsf001-3 The ones with a budget were probably using Sony Digital 8 Handyjobs. VGA stills would have looked pretty good printed in a '90s magazine.
[gentle floppy disk noises, gentler jazz music] I love your captions!
Thanks 😁
I remember thinking 640*480 was a good enough resolution for digital cameras because pictures of that size looked decent on my 1024*768 monitor and appeared as roughly the size of a normal photograph.
@@franky9928 I've recently learned that the design resolution for macOS ICONS is 1024*1024. I'm imagining my old Riva TNT struggling to display more than two freaking buttons.
I remember gaming magazines and demo discs back in the day boasting about "high resolution screenshots" of upcoming games. They were all 640x480!
@@PhAyzoNTo be fair, very few games ran at 640x480 in the 90s. Most console games ran at much lower resolution - with very few games actually running at a native 480i - so 640x480 was enough to capture just about any game footage.
I've noticed that a 640x480 is still plenty enough for your Instagram feed and such. Have few Mavica shots on mine, can't really tell they're 20 plus years old. (Well, technically. New old stock?)
I remember when I thought 3.5" floppies could hold 3 Megabytes because the ones I had said "3M" on them
Engineering Dept: "Stop showing the floppies going in backwards!"
Marketing: "NEVER!"
How else with they know it's a floppy? 😱
Don't forget, there's also upside-down CD'S.
I wonder if any customers inserted their diskettes wrong because of that.
I was very disturbed by that image.
@@4Wilko I know people inserted RAM expansions backwards in their computers because of that
My mom was a professional photographer in the late 90s. She had something similar to this. She used an expensive medium format camera for the serious photos at weddings and for portraits. But she also carried an early digital camera and a portable printer that she could use at the reception to grab photos of guests and whatnot. She could then print photos right there on the spot for people to take home. Her printer was a lot smaller than this one. I am pretty sure it was ink jet and only printed wallets and 4x6 or 5x7s.
The Polaroid Instant cameras used to fulfill that role, but your mom was ahead of the trend which is now wedding parties handing out a dozen Fuji Instax which every one passes around. All the material becoming people taking, leaving, trading or gifting some of the pics to the couple.
We went to EuroDisney in 1996. On the Thunder Mountain Roller Coater they had cameras capturing each pair of seats at the top of the loop. When you got off the ride you could see all the pictures on screens and if you liked yours buy a decent sized dye sub printout. Very impressive stuff for the time.
I'm so happy you make proper videos and not shorts. Theyre a true blight.
In the late 1990s I was working as a computer magazine journalist. I undertook a group test review of lots of colour inkjet printers, and one test was photo print quality. The ideal of saving money and time on getting "professional photo prints" was very alluring for many. In my testing I learned that, to match 35mm photo print quality, you usually had to match the manufacturer's own brand of premium photo printer paper to their own printer, and then select to print at high quality (so, usually, very slow - it could take several minutes to output). And then your print had a limited life span because, ultimately, it was just ink on paper. They were very prone to UV light damage meaning that, if you pinned one to a refrigerator (for example), light coming in from the window would slowly bleach out all the colour over the space of a year or two. Only cyan would stick around, if I recall correctly. I'm actually not sure if things are better right now. Back then, we all considered dye sublimation printing technology to be the best for photos - but it was many times the cost of the cheap inkjets that were flooding the market.
Dye sublimation technology (it's Mitsubishi ALPS originally, everyone else licensed it, including Sony and Canon) is still really good, it's the only printing technology that allows to reproduce full sRGB range in print - and considering that some, if not all, implementations include the “fifth dye”, which is an anti-UV protection layer, they are probably the longest lasting form of color photographs, apart from plasticized prints that are sandwiched between a sheet of Alubond and a sheet of UV-stable acrylic (and that costs... no... T.H.A.T. C.O.S.T.S.). That puts properly processed Kodachromes that are stored in national archives like the LOC or BNA to a third place, because plastic sheets with UV protection layer are much more stable medium than a celluloid film or even an offset paper and ink (those discolored 1960s...2000s magazines, aha).
There are two problems with dye-sub prints. First, the largest format of DSPs ever available was and is 21×30 cm (only Mitsubishi and Sony did that, not Canon). Second, they are quite sensitive to dust before and during printing, Canon in particular.
As someone who enjoys papercrafting and tried printing a model using photo paper a few months back, they are not... I spent quite a while building the damn thing and the result looked awesome, until I noticed how the browns became greens and reds became oranges some weeks later. Tossed all of the models built with photo paper in the trash
Cool.
@@IgnatSolovey The largest DSP for consumer use was 21x30cm, but there were commercial ones that printed 120cm wide. They were massive, company I worked for had 2 of them at one point.
@@IgnatSoloveyTektronix, which sold their printer operation to Xerox, did 12 x 18 inch (366x457 mm) dye-sub. See the Phaser 480X.
I honestly can't get over the quality of those photos for 1999.
The mini arcades on that vintage camera legit looked like an early 90s arcade lineup on a high end Polaroid. Very cool xD
"Stick em on your Angelfire page?"
Damn, guilty as charged
It still astounds me when we look at pictures my Grandma took in the 90s (When I was a wee baby) that you can make out fine details on the film like the covers of books or the shape of flower petals in the background.
35mm film in particular is awesome.
The effective resolution equivalent is larger than 4K: 5,600 x 3,620 pixels!
@@LGR The reason "digital remasters" are garbage on non- film media :P
@@LGR Oh? That explains a lot, thanks!
I love everything about this. The aesthetic of the unit, the controls. The ASMR.
3.5 inch Floppies will never not be satisfying to use. Clunk!
*style
*3.5 inch
My middle school teacher had that printer for science fair projects, I used to borrow the Mavica camera for photos of growing vegetables, insert the floppy disk and printed the photo for progress reports! That saved so many students time and effort for school projects!
That's a great use case!
@@LGR saved lot of students time and from buying more film!
You know, you hear "floppy disk photo printer from the 90s" and you think it's going to be cute and antiquated, but damn if that thing doesn't put out some seriously good looking prints, and the ability to screenshot composite video sources like that is amazing. I would have used that to an irresponsible level if I had had that as a kid.
if i had something tike that, i would used to an irresponsible level too for sure. I would print alots of screenshots of ps1 games and dragon ball prints from tv, thats for sure.
What making a secret Jack stash from your dad’s vhs p*rn? Lol
I took a selfie with this same camera in 2002. I used that very same selfie to meet my now current wife 3 years later. and to prove the Internet never forgets. That image is still online some 20+ years later.
I have a Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 camera that I bought circa 2000. It uses 8cm cd discs to store the images. When you take photos with it, you can hear the CD spinning up and the read/write head activating. The photo quality was exceptional for the time and still looks impressive. Paired with a good inkjet printer, it rivals film camera prints of the day. I have dozens of the 8cm discs with my photos. They are still readable to this day. Truly a nostalgic electronic device to have.
"stick em on your Angelfire". LOL Dude, you unlocked a core memory.
Hey Clint, you inspired me to grab myself a FD-90 and shoot some stuff at a recent blink-182 concert - so much fun to use. Thanks, as always, for your great content!
I love the style. Tech aesthetics peaked in the late 90s/early 00s, IMO
Man I love the look of older Sony gear. Just looks so clean and advanced. If they still made stuff that looked this cool, I'd be more tempted to go with Sony.
I'd actually really like the look of the PS5 if it weren't so annoyingly huge.
@@eggbreakerdotexeI guess now with the Slim on the horizon, that appreciation might be attainable.
Sony cameras still look small, sleek, and cool.
Chunky, angled, and gunmetal-grey. Classic, 90’s, Sony tech was rad, man, and it felt satisfying to use. :)
Those pictures look super good. It's rare to see physical pictures of such things and of that quality. Its like a real good magazine article picture.
Ooo, being able to capture arbitrary input video frames is SUCH a fun feature to add on there! Neat use of the technology already prepped to print video stills!
Love the tuctuctuctuctuc of the later Mavicas steaming past the tracks compared to the speed of a regular floppy drive.
Yes, those 4X drives in particular are quite impressive!
I love how direct video capture has literally never become an obsolete selling point. I remember an ad for a Samsung phone a couple years back that touted the video quality being so good that you could capture photography quality screengrabs with a button in its video player.
late 90's early 00's I worked at as a Walmart 1hr photo developer. We had got the new frontier digital photo printing system that took the digital content and created photos through the same system as our 35mm. It was and still is the best digital printing you could get. It took high res photos from your digital camera and projected it onto real photo paper that was chemically processed. In high school I was very involved in the technology teams and we had several of the sony mavica cameras because of the easy and cheap floppies that we used to take photos for newsletters, our first school website (that I built), and even to use for our yearbook. If you take my school yearbooks from 99-01 99% of the photos were all taken by that Sony Camera. I carried at least a pack of 50 in my camera bag for every event.
As always. Us being men of similar age and homeschooled in the US, I always feel that nostalgia of a time I’ve known, but my family never was in a place to get this stuff. You get it and I support you. Thank you, Clint. I genuinely love the heck out of you and you make my day always. Keep it up!
I never get bored of this channel. And that's quite a nice achievement, I would say 😂
LGR is the GOAT
That color quality is impressive can you imagine doing that in 1999 people would be shocked to see you printing glossy images like that at home.
the depth is incredible, I remember printing shit out on printer paper and it looked like shit
“Briefly flip through every decade or so” - brutal and true assessment of what family photos are really worth
Photo albums are a time capsule. Best opened 30 years or more later. Practically worthless more than 1 week after they're taken, they start to rise in value exponentially every few decades.
my 1st professional job in IT was back in 99 and we had the FD mavica. I thought it was amazing back then. We used that camera for site surveys. Never had the printer, but it looks awesome and I would have been blown away.
The beeps it makes sound very similar to the playstation 3 sounds when you power it on. That is awesome.
I found a boxed complete Mavica in the redundant kit box at work in 2014.. I still have it. Still works.
Hearing Clint's distinct yet accurate duke voice -- I am pretty sure it was him doing the duke voice on duke nukem forever online a while back.
I would have loved to have that in the 90s! Even without using the printer part it's still cool just to take screenshots from the TV. That it can print such great images is a bonus.
I got to use a Sony Floppy camera in 2000 while in 8th grade to build the school's website. The computer teacher got me in an independent study class for the website and later hooked me up with the summer tech maintenance guys for my first "real" job. I recently got most of my old ZIP disks copied off with the photos I took, and they were not good, haha.
This brings some nice memories from the nineties. I would loved to have this printer so I could work with my digital cameras. Nice.
This video made my floppy disc turn into a hard drive. Maximum nerdification achieved, loved this.
Your glee is contagious.
Old sony stuff is such a joy. Such cool designs.
That's literally spectacular. Really nice print quality, and I remember using my school library's Mavica back in the day. It was very cool.
I still have a cd based mavca cd1000 and i just took it on vacation this summer and shot nearly 200 photos with it and it still works perfectly and the photos it takes are good enough that u cant tell that they were taken on a over 20 years old camera as long as u dont try to zoom in
"Why? Why not it's awesome!"
I miss this style of technology.
8:53 Sony really likes their loud beeps, I thought it was my PlayStation booting up.
Back in '99 or '00 I had a gig using that exact Mavica ( the first one you showed) with a couple of nightclubs taking photos of peeps for their very 90s website. I recall the hassle of going around with a bunch of floppy disks. Add alcohol to the mix and you could say that was not my best body of work. LoL
Devices like this must have been a treat for folks who had to get screen captures for whatever publications they worked for. Hell, I could see myself using something like this still.
Ahh, the circus statue picture, how it warms the cockles of my heart
Even as a 35mm film camera enthusiast, who will regularly spend $16 for a roll of film and then $25 developing and scanning it at a lab, for a cost of $1.15 per photo, it's still crazy to me to think that just taking a picture wasn't free for so many decades. When I'm taking film pictures, I'm trying to compose art, it's not like just grabbing my phone and getting a picture for posterity. The idea that it was costly to recall images through photographs for just, the general everyday life we experience, it's crazy. Taking a photo being a free thing now makes it a shortcut for so much. Want to remember what this restaurant has on its menu? Picture. Forgot to take notes on the slide and the presenter is about to switch slides? photo. Want to record the odometer reading at the oil change you just did? photo. Your odometer hit a palendrome? photo to show your friends. If each of those cost $2 we wouldn't use them for everything like we do now.
I kinda miss the "1 hour photo" days. The winding, the beep. It just felt really comfy. The modern practice of tapping a screen doesn't come close to the aesthetic of those old disposable cameras
But anytime snapping is pretty convenient. I bet if a functional consumer-equivalent of QR codes existed in the 90s you'd have to take a picture of the pattern, develop it, mail it to the company, and wait for a response. Even less than 10 years after I worked at Walmart they've switched from scan guns to smart phones for reading the shelf labels
Tangentially related: I remember when I was really into cinematography and video editing stuff I wanted to get one of those home camera negative scanners. I'd usually just resort to a flatbed scanner though
Rolls of film and getting them developed were much cheaper back in the day.
I had a Fuji thermal printer around 2005. No floppy but had USB and SD. Printed to 4x6 sheets in a feeder tray. Used it a few times but it’s sat in a cupboard since.
Not going to lie, I love that 80s/90s vibe the pictures give.
I wish i was born during this era of tech cause it would've been really cool to grow up with! And to think this kinda stuff even existed back then is amazing!
That's much better quality than i expected. Would've loved to have that back in the day.
I bet your bro really loves these types of videos from you! Early digital photography is very cool.
Amazing, thoroughly done video, of a beautiful product hitting all the right buttons as you said, printing, floppies, graphics, 90's, Mavica... Just very special overall!!
Very impressed by the quality of those prints!
i own a mavica fd91 and fd95 and I even have the boxes and manuals for both and even some of the cables too!. I was genuinely surprised by how good the photo quality is on them. theyre such cool little cameras!
also anyone else notice the sound when clint presses the print button sounds like the ps3's sound when you try to eject a disk but theres no disk in there? or was it the ps4? anyway, you know what i mean.
Like you said, it would make a great TH-cam short.
And yet, definitely deserving of 20+ mins of coverage. The video capture was a "killer feature."
Hearing the old Sony shutter sound bought back a core memory
4:12 That looks like it would be the best vintage window Air-conditioning unit ever!
I'm so glad you've uploaded and printed a high resolution modern image as well, to check the absolute best quality the printer can manage! Top-notch work, thank you!
I bought a lot of 9 mavica cameras off a guy a month or two ago, he still had some of the paperwork intact including a booklet advertising accessories for the later models that could use memory stick. It had lenses, tripods, even an add on that would turn the screen into a viewfinder. And this printer! I had assumed none of this actually came out, but it’s fun that it did!
The device itself has such a fantastic aesthetic. Would look right at home on the set of some kind of retro-futurist movie.
I absolutely love this camera and all your videos about it adding the printer just makes makes it perfection
Thank you for this! I bought one of these a year or so ago and this gives me the motivation to get it running again
I love these consumer electronic product showcases. Brings back some memories I had long relegated to the dusty corners of my subconscious and found myself feeling old but somehow happy and satisfied with the nostalgic feeling only these videos can provide. Keep them coming!
Well this was a blast from the past. Used that Sony digital cam a bunch in Grade 7, ~2003. Sports day photography comes to mind in-particular. I don't remember any prints being made (Although it's possible). We did make a slideshow that was then presented at an assembly iirc
had one of those old floppy sony cameras at my job years ago. you including the little writing to disk sound when you were taking pictures made me smile :)
Hello Mr LGR. I have been enjoying your videos for a few years now and I decided that today was a good day to tell you to keep up this fascinating niche of older computing machines. Best of luck to you!
Thank you, I appreciate that and hope you continue to enjoy the show!
Wonderful! That dye sublimation process always gives pleasing results. The Sony UP-5000 you briefly showed is an absolute beast, if you get a chance to pick one up, go for it! (I used to repair them)
Yeah that's a monster that I'd find it hard to say no to!
8 1/4" x 5 3/4" prints is awesome.
the fact that I own a good couple of mavicas myself makes this all the more enjoyable to watch, keep up the good work
Thank you very much for all the context and all the research that goes along with it. And then there is the process of putting it all together in an entertaining video ...
My pleasure!
I love your videos, they really bring a sense of relaxation. Keep doing what you are doing! You are amazing!
4:26 - it is the same device they have in The Ring when Rachel visits the video editing place to print out stills from the tape! Look up the scene, it's on YT, "the ring fly scene".
This is an awesome little device, pretty expensive but if I had one I'd have printed everything I had back then! I used to love taking pictures of everything with my little compact camera.
13:47 - the beeping is the same or very similar to what a PS3 does when you press the eject button but there's no disk inside :)
15:14 - this is an amazing way to take screenshots of video games, I wonder how many magazines used this (if any) for their screenshots! My mind is blown!
I’m glad to have another addition to Sony Mavica content on this channel!
Watching from the middle of the San Francisco Bay. LGR is still great at sea!
My local mall in 2000 had one of these set up at a kiosk so anyone could just print out floppy disk pictures for a few cents, as a way to generate foot traffic. I only used it a few times for school work, but I appreciated that back then as it wasn't yet the era of cheap thumb drives for students. It was fun, but limited in use and time, but it was neat.
My Dad actually gifted me one of those mavica digital cameras when I was a kid. He received it either from someone he knew at Sony, or a distributor (I'm not really sure which. The only caveat was that I was asked to write a short review of the features and UI. The quality of course wasn't up to the same standards as the 35mm SLRs I owned at the time (Or even some of the point and shoots for that matter) but it was a fun toy, and the ability to instantly view the photo you had taken was mind blowing for someone who grew up having to wait for a roll of film to be developed and pray that the one shot I had really wanted turned out well.
I love that you have used that Sony camera in a few of your vids. That was one of my favorite things to take with me on family road trips. My dad won it at work for a Xmas raffle. My mom probably threw it away by now
I like how u don’t beg for patreon followers, solid channel
I'm curious on how this printer will handle a signal that has macrovision in it like from a DVD player or VCR playing a copy protected tape.
i think it will ignore it.
the quality of the pics look like something you'd find in a magazine back in the 90s
Those Mavicas were amazingly good cameras for the time, and that printer does them justice. I would have gladly owned (and used) both of those back in the day.
This is the coolest thing i have seen on LGR yet!!!
Interesting to hear the PS 'Beeps' with something before they were used for the PS; and they've stuck with them all these years later!🎵
What a cool device. It's all so awesome that it still works.
The colors! Fantastic saturation and contrast. It actually looks better than current budget inkjet printers do; even when using photo paper. I'm not for sure if it says more about the Mavica printer, or the printer racket in general (which is an absolute racket).
Dye-sub prints are usually good. They are what the instant print kiosks in places like chemists use. I found that out when one ran out of paper when I was printing about 100 photos on it and a store assistant had to load more in. The only major difference to home printers was that the paper was on a roll
Always a good day when LGR posts video about retro device. Cool stuff indeed
It would be cool to take screenshots of games back then with this.
Amazing! This printer is still very usable today, the picture quality is great. Excellent video as always.
Getting John St John in as a guest, amazing!
That's awesome! The colors are awesome, the details are awesome, I want one!
It's like the perfect teleshopping video we've never had. I know it's old but I want to buy it.
We had an old Canon Selphy photo printer in the early 2000s. I loved being able to get ACTUAL PHYSICAL PHOTOS on demand!
I remember using those floppy disk Mavicas in high school. Later I bought a CD Mavica digital camera. It would burn to CD-Rs or RWs. Pretty wild tech. Had pretty good image quality for the 2002-2003 timeframe as well.
love the look of the tv so square so professional
Fascinating! The calendar was a nice touch too
Surprisingly, this device doing things. Nice review.