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Sony MVC-CD1000 (NOTE: This camera is not in stores yet. Projected ship date is early August, 2000)

	*2.1 megapixel CCD delivering 1600x1200 pixel images
	*156 Megabyte CD-R drive for image storage (!)
	*Lower JPEG compression, optional uncompressed TIFF format
	*12-bit digitization, extensive exposure controls

Permanently archived digital photos straight from your camera, at about $0.02 apiece! No more file-compression limitations for the Mavica line! - For the last four days, we here at the Imaging Resource have had a unique opportunity to test and work with a brand new camera from Sony that we feel is arguably the most significant digicam announcement this year. Just as their perennially popular floppy disk-based Mavica line seemed headed for a technological dead end, Sony has pulled an amazing hole card and produced a new camera with dirt-cheap removable media and essentially no capacity limitations, all the while retaining the universal usability and "no cables" appeal of the original Mavica line. The secret? A 3" (77mm) CD-R drive integrated with a 2.1 megapixel digital camera. The CD-R gives the new Mavica 156 megabytes of removable (yet directly archivable) storage capacity, eliminating the ever-increasing storage crunch as multi-megapixel sensors pushed up against the 1.44 megabyte capacity limit of conventional floppies. Combined with the rich feature set, 2.1 megapixel CCD, and 12 bit digitization of their previous top of the line MVC-FD95, the new model clearly deserves the title of "ultimate Mavica." (Uber-Mavica?)

While the heroes here are the Sony engineers who managed to make CD-R work in a portable device, the real winners are clearly the camera-buying consumers, particularly the huge segment who liked the cheap-media/no-cables aesthetic of Sony's Digital Mavica series. We see the resulting camera, the MVC-CD1000 as one of the most significant product announcements in the digicam industry in the last 12 months, and a likely harbinger of things to come. Before we delve into the specifics of this new model, let's first take a look back at the digicam industry over the last couple of years, to explain why we think the MVC-CD1000 is so significant.



Look Ma, No Cables! The Triune Way to Media Nirvana...
Much to the dismay of their competitors, Sony has more or less dominated the US digital camera market over the last two years, thanks almost entirely to their Mavica product line. This has perplexed many enthusiasts and pundits (ourselves sometimes included), who've pointed to the Mavica models' generally higher prices and lower resolutions than competing models. "Geez," they/we would say to a new or prospective Mavica owner, "you could have bought a camera with twice the resolution for the same amount of money! What's the deal?" To which the Mavica owner would invariably reply something along the lines of: "I don't care, I just stick the floppy in my computer, and I've got my pictures. (And they're fine pictures for what I want to do with them.)"

There are of course other reasons people buy Mavicas, including the much longer than average zoom ratios on the lenses of many models. As we've pointed out in the past, a 14x zoom lens on an 0.8 megapixel camera gives you the same number of pixels on a distant subject as would a 17 megapixel(!) camera with a 3x zoom lens. Ultimately though, the Mavica purchase decision almost always ended up being heavily influenced by the fact that the cameras stored their pictures on standard floppy disks. Why is this such an overriding issue with users? Understanding the importance of the floppy is essential to understanding how Sony has consistently managed to capture 30-40 percent of the entire US camera market year after year. At the root of the issue are three key factors that we've puckishly called the "Triune Way to Media Nirvana." Follow the three steps of The Way, incorporate them into otherwise reasonably well-designed digicams, and you too can rule the digicam marketplace. ;-) Here are the keys to Media Happiness:

1) Cost: Media of the Way must be cheap, preferably very cheap. Floppies satisfied this requirement admirably, as they've become almost a disposable commodity. This is important for several reasons. For individual users, the appeal of cheap media is obvious. Going on a long trip? No problem, just bring along a 50-pack of floppies, and you're all set. What's maybe less obvious is the appeal of cheap media in corporate, organizational, institutional, and educational settings. School generally aren't too keen on kids running around with cameras having a $100-200 chip in them that can be removed and lost or stolen. Even in a corporate environment, the risk of loss of expensive media is enough to keep otherwise worthy cameras off purchase lists. The fact that the Digital Mavicas used media that was so cheap as to be almost free was a huge benefit in a number of these high-volume market segments.

2) Capacity: Media of the Way must have plenty of capacity. Floppies fit this requirement pretty well in the early days of VGA resolution (640x480) cameras, when a "high quality" image occupied only 100K or so. Fourteen or fifteen "high quality" images on a disk? Cool! Need to shoot more? No problem, just stick in another twenty-cent disk and shoot another fifteen or so photos. This is the area that was becoming an increasing problem for the Mavicas though, as CCD resolution and image quality continued to rise. The latest floppy-based Mavicas could only store 4 images per floppy in their highest-quality mode, and even at that were using more image compression than many users wanted to settle for. Clearly something had to give, leading many to predict that Sony's market edge would eventually turn into a liability, given the Mavica's dependence on floppies.

3) Universality: Media of the Way can be used in any computer anywhere, any time, without special software or hardware to access it. This was the ultimate selling point for the Mavicas: Virtually every computer in the world has a floppy disk drive in it, and just about all of them can read standard DOS-formatted 1.44 megabyte floppies. You could therefore take an image-bearing floppy disk out of any Mavica, stick it into virtually any consumer-level computer, and immediately use the photos. No software, no cables, no muss, no fuss. People hate cables. People love floppies. People loved Mavicas and paid a premium for them. People bought hundreds of thousands of Mavica cameras for this simple reason: They could use their images. (And their friends could too.)


Running out of steam: The capacity crunch
As noted above, the floppy disk fulfilled all the requirements of the "Way" when typical image file sizes were under 100K, but had an increasingly hard time as resolution and file sizes grew. One possible solution to the crunch appeared in the form of the FlashPath adapter for Memory Sticks. This clever gadget was developed by SmartDisk Corporation, as a variation of their earlier units created for use with SmartMedia cards. The (exact) size and shape of a floppy disk, the FlashPath could be inserted into a computer's floppy-disk drive, and be read and written to just like a standard floppy. Well, almost... The FlashPath required custom driver software to be installed on the host computer to trick the floppy drive into dealing with the odd, non-rotating device. Also, quirks of the Macintosh floppy drive design precluded the ability to write to the FlashPath, restricting its use as a read-only medium. (Not a major problem for digicam usage, since the main objective is to read images from the memory card into the host computer.) The special version of the FlashPath adapter created for Sony accepted Sony's Memory Stick memory cards, and had special firmware to allow it to work with the latest Mavica designs. (Sorry, pre-2000 Mavicas can't use the new FlashPath memory solutions.)

The FlashPath approach relieved the capacity crunch, as Memory Sticks are currently (June, 2000) available with capacities as high as 64 megabytes. They unfortunately violate the other two principles of the Triune Way however: They're expensive (the FlashPath itself sells for about $100, and a high-capacity Memory Stick is another $100 or more), and some of the universality is lost. True, most computers can be made to read FlashPath devices, but doing so requires the installation of software drivers. While this installation process is simple enough, it's enough to stop many consumers in their tracks. So, the FlashPath/Memory Stick solution was only a partial solution, and one not likely destined to be popular.


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 OS 9.0.4.)


General Camera Features
The close resemblance between Sony's new FD95 Mavica and the just-announced CD1000 is no accident: Rather than build a new camera from the ground up around the CD-R technology (but can that be far behind?), Sony engineers instead opted to simply graft the new CD-R drive onto an existing design. Thus, the body, controls, camera electronics, and most operating menus on the CD1000 are identical to those of the FD-95.


Here's a list of camera features, cribbed from our forthcoming full review of the FD-95:

• 2.1 megapixel, 1/3 inch CCD delivering up to 1600 x 1200 resolution images.
• 2.5 inch, color, TFT LCD monitor.
• Smaller, LCD optical viewfinder with data display.
• 10x, 6 to 60mm f/2.8-f/11 lens (equivalent to a 39 to 390mm lens on a 35mm camera.
• 2x digital telephoto.
• Steady Shot option to (dramatically) decrease camera shake.
• Program AE, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Twilight, Twilight Plus, Landscape and Panfocus capture modes.
• Shutter speeds from 8 to 1/500 seconds.
• Automatic, Outdoor, Indoor and One-Push white balance settings.
• Built-in, pop-up flash with Automatic, Red-Eye Reduction, Forced and Suppressed modes and manually controlled intensity settings.
• Spot metering option.
• 10 second self-timer.
• MPEG movie record mode.
• Voice Memo record mode.
• E-Mail and Text (GIF) still image record modes.
• Manual focus option.
• Image storage on 3.5 inch floppy disks or Sony MemorySticks with adapters.
• InfoLITHIUM battery system.

To this, add the following features unique to the CD1000:

• 156 Megabyte removable storage on 77mm CD-R media
• Fast ~3.5 second cycle time at full resolution
• Average JPEG compression of only 7:1 (MVC-FD95 average was 18:1)
• Optional uncompressed TIFF file format! (A Mavica first!)
• USB computer connection for high-speed downloads without "finalizing" disks
• Higher-capacity NP-550 InfoLITHIUM battery, to handle higher peak power drain of CD-R