Digital Camera Home > Digital Camera Reviews > Sony Digital Cameras > Sony Mavica CD1000

Sony Mavica CD1000 Sony packs a 156 megabyte CD-R into a 2 megapixel Mavica. (Wow!) Select a topic Reference: Datasheet CD1000 Sample Images --------------------------------- 1. Intro and Highlights 2. Executive Overview 3. Design 4. Viewfinder 5. Optics 6. Exposure & Flash 7. Shutter Lag & Cycle Time Tests 8. Operation & User Interface 9. Camera Modes & Menus 10. Image Storage & Interface 11. Video, Power, Software 12. Test Results & Conclusion --------------------------------- Print-Friendly Review Version Additional Resources and Other Links Reader Comments --------------------------------- Digital Camera Comparometer (TM) --------------------------------- <-- Digital Cameras (Home) <-- Digital Camera Reviews Index <<Camera Modes & Menus :(Previous) | (Next): Video, Power, Software>> Page 10:Image Storage & Interface Review First Posted: 7/17/2000

Image Storage and Interface
As we expounded on earlier and touted as the camera's most interesting feature, the MVC-CD1000 records still images and movies to a three inch (77mm) CD-R. This eliminates a good deal of the hassle of downloading files from the camera to your computer. Instead of messing around with cables and driver software, you just take the CD-R from the camera and slide it into your computer's CD-R drive. An adapter comes with the camera to accommodate computers that don't accept the three inch CD-R format. There's also a USB connection and cable supplied with the camera for USB connections (the USB port is actually beneath the lens, protected by a small plastic cover). A small CD-R icon on the camera's LCD display lets you know how much of the disk is full and how many images have been shot. The MVC-CD1000 allows you to protect individual images on the disk from accidental erasure or alteration through the playback menu. The freedom of a CD-R drive has many advantages over saving images to floppies, the main one being an increased amount of storage space - 156 megabytes.

Using the CD-Rs in the camera is relatively simple. Whenever a new disk (or one that has previously been "finalized" is inserted, the camera will tell you that the disk needs to be initialized. Not being CD mavens, we suspect (but aren't sure) that this involves writing the "lead in" area for the next session, a roughly 9 megabyte area reserved for table of contents information for the session to come. (See Adaptec's CD-R site for information on the whole topic, including an excellent glossary.) Initializing the disc appears to be a more critical operation than normal CD-R recording, as the camera asks you to place it on a level surface and avoid vibration during the process. The series of screens at right step you through the process. Once a disk has been initialized, operation of the CD1000 is the same as that of any other Sony camera, regardless of media.

When you're done with a set of shots and want to set up the CD-R to be read in a conventional CD-ROM drive, you must "Finalize" the session. The camera leads you through a set of screens for this process also, similar to those shown above for the initialization process. Finalizing also appears to be a more critical procedure than normal image writing, since the camera again asks you to rest it on a flat surface. Our guess is that this process writes the lead out for that session, and goes back to fill-in the Table of Contents for the session in the lead-in area. The first lead-out on a disk occupies about 13 megabytes of space, subsequent ones require about 4 megabytes.

You get a well rounded selection of image sizes with the MVC-CD1000, from 1600 x 1200 to 1024 x 768 to 640 x 480. There's also a 1600 3:2 aspect image size which crops the top and bottom of the image slightly and an option for uncompressed TIFF. As noted earlier, a significant benefit of the increased storage capacity of the CD-R on the CD1000 is that Sony could use much lower JPEG compression ratios than on their earlier Mavica models. (For comparison, the maximum-quality JPEG on the CD1000 uses about a 6:1 JPEG compression, whereas the FD95 had to use 16:1 for the same image size. At low resolution the difference is 7:1 vs 19:1.)

Below are the approximate amount of images and compression ratios for the CD-R disc:

Resolution/Quality vs Image Capacity	High Resolution		Standard Resolution		Low Resolution
	Images	Approx. Compression	Images	Approx. Compression	Images	Approx. Compression
Uncompressed	20	1:1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Normal Quality	160	6:1	350	5:1	1080	7:1

Notes for Mac owners: In order to avoid a 1-megabyte limit on writeable file size, Sony had to go with the Level 3 ISO CD standard, which supports larger data sizes in packet-writing mode. This means though, that Macs need a UDF format extension to be added to the Mac OS to enable reading of the resulting disks. NOTE that the "UDF Volume Access" extension that ships with OS9 is apparently not adequate to the task. Although Apple's UDF Volume Access claims support for version 1.5 of the UDF ("Universal Disk Format (tm)") specification, the Roxio UDF Volume Access Version 1.04 extension is apparently required to read the version of the UDF format used by the Mavica MVC-CD1000. We can, however attest to the fact that the iMac supports both the 77mm disk size, as well as the Adaptec Volume Access extension, as we were able to successfully read "finalized" CDs from the MVC-CD1000 on our slot-loading iMac. (A 400MHz DV model, running Mac OS 9.0.4.)