Digital Cameras - Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 "First Look" Camera Review

An "Out of the Blue" Solution: CD-R
It may be unpardonable conceit, but we're always amazed when someone thinks of something that hadn't at least occurred to us first. ;-) Actually, it's not so much that we're so smart (no emphatic agreement from our readership, please!), as that most of the developments in the digital camera world represent incremental improvements of existing technology. The FlashPath was clearly a unique solution from an unexpected direction, but that was a couple of years ago. Since then, much of digicam development has been a matter of another megapixel here, a user-interface tweak there, and so on. (This isn't to deny that digicams have advanced enormously over the last two years, but few of those advances could truly be called revolutionary.)

We have to admit then, that we were among those tsk-tsking over Sony's seemingly unbreakable commitment to the Almighty Floppy: "Nice run while it lasted, but now it's time for someone else to have a turn" would about sum up our attitude to the Mavicas. In support of this, we felt that Sony themselves had seen the writing on the wall, with their higher-end CyberShot digicam line moving to semiconductor memory in the form of Memory Sticks, rather than floppy-based storage. True, the newest Mavicas, with their 12 bit A/D conversion, greatly improved low-light capability, and higher-resolution sensors did a lot to breathe new life into the line, but we were feeling that the rest of the digicam world was finally going to get a chance to catch up with the market share that Sony had built upon the Mavicas' popularity.

We further confess that the idea of putting a CD-R into a digicam never occurred to us. For one thing, as far as we knew, CDs pretty much needed to be five inches (120mm, to be precise) in diameter, although we'd seen those CD business cards along with everyone else. We knew that the CD business cards caused problems in a range of drives, so didn't consider smaller formats to be viable. Well, it turns out that not only are small CDs viable, but there's actually a provision in the official ISO specification for CDs having diameters of both 120 and 77 mm. In fact, virtually any CD drive out there can physically handle the 77mm CD size, including the new slot-loading iMacs! (Emphasis on the latter, because we really didn't think this would be the case, until we checked the specs. For those interested, here's a link to the Apple Technical Library article that discusses this - turns out odd shapes are a no-no, but 77mm size is just fine.) Actually though, even if your CD drive doesn't support the smaller disks, you're still OK: Sony provides the interesting "CD Expander Donut" (our term ;) shown in the photo at left.

Completely aside from the issue of size, the other thing blocking our thought processes about CD-Rs in digicams was our awareness of how finicky CD-R writing can be: We've got more than our fair share of "coasters" (non-functional, written CD-Rs) to prove the point. It seems this is an area where Sony's electromechanical/optoelectronic engineers really worked overtime, in designing a CD-R system with sufficiently robust head-tracking to enable it to write successfully, even in the face of moderate amounts of vibration, changes in orientation, etc.

Not enough hurdles? How about one more: Normal CD writing basically involves burning data into a continuous spiral track occupying the entire data area of the CD. "Multisession" technology has existed for a while, that allows data to be recorded in discrete batches, but as far as we know, this is limited to a few or at most a few dozen "sessions" per disk. In a camera, unless you trust mightily to a mammoth buffer memory, each photo is logically a separate writing event, meaning that there could be hundreds or even thousands of separate "sessions" per disk. Yikes!

It turns out that "packet writing" is the key to avoiding this problem, as it provides a way for the CD recorder to drop discrete chunks of data into place, without having to open and close a "session" each time. Tricky stuff, but it works. In order to read the resulting disks with a normal CD drive though, you have to "finalize" a session, which eats about 8% (roughly 13 megabytes for sessions after the first one, for lead-in and lead-out areas) of the total disk space. Thus, you'll want to view the images in the camera until you're ready to offload a fair number of them. Alternatively, if you have a packet-capable CD-R drive (note, CD-R, not just a CD-ROM drive), driver software from Adaptec (and possibly others) will let you read the disks, even if they haven't been "finalized." This could be viewed as a bit of a limitation, but the MVC-CD1000 also sports the first USB port on a Mavica, allowing images to be read from "unfinalized" disks just as you would from a normal USB-connected digicam.

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 Adaptec 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 OS9.0.4.)