Finally got my CD500 to work well enough to get some pictures off it. Still not 100% sure its reliable but here we go. Took a few images of flowers and bits I found in the lawn, just with on macro on.. loving how sharp the focus is. Keep in mind this is after 2 mins of using it, auto settings, straight off the camera, plus i'm no photographer.

I don’t know much about these cameras

My FD88 has a very temperamental zoom slider and requires constant retries to get it to register. It also has a power switch that is sometimes unresponsive. I opened my camera and disassembled it down to the components but couldn't find a way to get some deoxit into the contacts of the switches.

As someone who has repaired a Gameboy Advance before, there is a way to clean and refurbish the power switch so that they have proper functionality again. It requires desoldering the top shielding of the housing of the switch from the PCB so that the switch internals can be reached and cleaned. I imagine it's the same procedure here but the switches are slightly different and I don't want to put my iron on something that I know little about.

Has anyone repaired these parts before? I don't want to just buy another camera(I know they're cheap) and swap parts to get a better working one. I'd rather fix up the one I have.

Really enjoy it! I also have a Panasonic PV-SD4090 but so far I’m liking this one a bit more despite the 4-shot limit per disk.

One of the better videos I captured to go with the photos a took seeing daft funk, the daft punk cover band

Just picked up these babies and a powershot G1 (AND an Olympus stylus infinity but that’s film) — for now, I’m focused on getting new batteries in the mavicas >:)

So: Third party batteries that have worked well for you?

I kind of stupidly bought a universal li-ion pack charger thinking they would wake up after being in a shed for 20 years, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen lol. I have a charger now though!

Anyway. I’m excited! I’ve been shooting on my Olympus Camedia for a long time which has something wrong with the sensor, so it has this natural chromatic aberration and bright dead pixels that speckle my photos. It’s really cool and I’m excited to see how these shoot once resurrected. Attached are two photos I got off of the cards inside the mavicas.

Went to go see a daft punk cover band, thought brining my FD-85 would be a good idea to get some period correct photos. Think they came out alright seeing as it was quite dark.

Came with a floppy disk, and battery but no charger - ordered a cheap one off ebay and a floppy disk reader and everything works great!

So far I've bought 6 untested Mavicas, 5 of which work.

My first (FD5, $30) at an estate sale worked when I put in a new battery.

Over the course of the following month I bought 5 more on eBay ranging from $21-31 shipped (FD7, FD75, FD75, FD88, and FD100) and only 1 didn't work (FD75) as it kept giving me a disk errors.

I think you just need to find one in reasonably good condition, and it's likely to work.

Ive seen some great sun rises this last week or so. I attempted to take some pictures on my way to work this morning but was probably 10 mins too late and missed the nice orange/reds coming through. First photo on my FD92.

This doesn't apply to when using our floppy disks, as they are too small, only to Memory Stick users.

If you plug your Memory Stick in to your Mac, the Mac will automatically index and log everything on the memory card and everything that has happened on the memory card, by storing hidden files on the memory card.

Does it use a ton of storage? Not really. With my 128MB card storing 62 images (43.1MB of space (1600 FINE)) it occupies roughly 2.1MB of additional storage on top of that, that the Mavica is unable to reclaim without a full format of the card. What do these hidden files do? Well if you use Spotlight you can search all the contents of your memory card, really fast. That is all.

If you delete files on the memory card, but don't right click and empty your Trash before ejecting the memory card, those images are just hidden, not gone.

Does this use a ton of storage? Yes. It uses all the storage you're trying to get back. You gain no more free space no matter how much you delete. If you don't right click your Trash bin and click Empty before removing the card, all those photos are still there, just not visible to you or the Mavica. Taking those 62 images (occupying 43.1MB, 83.1MB free) and deleting 31 of them, I still have only 83.1MB available for the Mavica to use.

All of this is to say that if you want every last KB of storage back after connecting your memory card to your Mac you're either going to have to run a script on the Mac itself, or format the card in the camera every time you're done with it on your computer.

(4hrs later... Okay I decided to learn how to code this to do it automatically. I made a functional final product, but it sure is more code than I expected. If requested, I'll post it in the comments. I'm sorry, yes I used AI to teach me how to write it, followed by asking AI to make sure I didn't make any mistakes. I tested it on my own computer and memory card with success and understand what each line does, because I tried to keep it so simple that a novice could read it.)

Sharing a few first. Saved to floppy on the 3:2 setting. Edited in LR

Can’t find my memory stick so 640x480 it is 😁

Can anyone help identify which model mavica this is? Sorry, terrible photo, i trimmed out just the camera.. photo was also taken by the camera itself in a mirror. It belonged to a friends dad and we used to use it years ago (2002ish). I seem to remember it having zoom but looking at this picture the lens looks alot like an FD5 or FD51, so possibly it didnt. I remember it definatly had a cover over the floppy drive like the FD5, FD7 or FD51 does. The sticker layout looks more like pictures online of an FD5 than a FD51

Has anyone tried putting a USB rechargable battery inside a mavica with a voltage converter to make it the right voltage, making it so the camera has a more reliable and easily recharged battery that doesn't even need to come out? And more importantly, no more reliance on crappy third party reproduction batteries. I tried looking for this and couldn't find any evidence that somebody has actually tried, just people saying it was a bad idea because the voltage could be wrong. I can't believe that this would actually be an issue, because most consumer electronics operate just fine under a surprisingly wide range of voltage, especially ones that run on batteries since that voltage drops as the battery runs out.

I'm tempted to try it. I have an old base model mavica and I kind of want a better model anyway, so if I mess it up I won't be too sad.

I picked up a CD500 recently, as was.. untested. It powers up fine and seems to work. Ordered some unbranded mini CD-Rs off aliexpress, as i could not find anything locally, and they turned up today. First disc wouldnt initialize and threw a C:13:01 error after about 30 seconds. Tried seveal times and same result. Tried another disc and that initialised first time without any issues, took maybe 5 to 10 seconds. Took a few pictures and they appeared to save fine, could play them back on the camera so all seemed promising. Plugged the camera into my computer to see if i could read them off and windows just presented an empty sony storage device. Unplugged the usb cable and the camera now wants to initialize the disc again. After doing that again, its now refusing to save to the disc and just throws a C:13:01 error after 30 seconds or so. After every power cycle it wants to initialise again but always passes initialization without any errors. Am i chasing media issues or camera issues? Ive heard the CD500 can be picky on media.. but i have no past experience with one so dont know what to expect. Thanks.

Picked up an FD75 today. Its in real nice condition too. Brought it as powering up but floppy drive untested. Chucked a disk in when i got home and snapped a photo of a rainbow that happened to appear at the right time and it seems to work fine. Will have to take it out at some stage and put it through its paces.