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Digital Camera Review : Mavica-CD400
Nick Langley, one of our newly appointed Advisory teachers, introduces a new concept of getting digital pictures from a digital camera to a computer.
…look, no leads!
Digital cameras have made school trips and events instantly recordable and displayable for many teachers – no more buying, loading and sending off films to be developed – it’s now just a question of snapping away and printing off the images you like on the school printer.
Well that’s the theory. There have, however, always been frustrations …
“I got some nice pictures in the morning …”
“Has anybody seen the batteries for the camera? … Are they charged? … Where’s the charger?”
“How do I download my photos? … Has any one seen the leads?”
“The pictures are fuzzy, but they’ll have to do …”
You see, the fascination of seeing your pictures displayed on a digital camera’s screen can soon give way to the desire for better quality pictures from a camera which doesn’t give up after an hour because of its limited number of pictures or battery life.
What could be the answer? …
Sony have come up with a digital camera which addresses these problems and, as its name suggests, the Mavica-CD400 uses compact discs to store its’ photographs. With this camera it really is a case of taking your photos and then putting the 8cm CD into your computer’s CD drive to download them for printing – no leads!
Each CD has 156MB of memory, which means a minimum of 66 large, high quality images and a maximum of 1291 small, standard quality images. The camera comes with six recordable CDs and 1 rewritable CD, which means one gigabyte of memory - enough for any school trip or project.
It has a built in rechargeable battery which lasts for two hours – enough to take or view over a 1000 images – and it can be recharged by plugging a power lead into the camera (like a mobile phone) – no more searching for the battery charger.
There are the normal easy-to-use features you would expect of a good quality digital camera - colour LCD screen (no view finder), zoom, automatic focusing system, preset scene modes and a built in pop up flash – which means point and press for clear photos. There are of course a host of other features, but the main one which may be of interest to teachers is the movie making facility - 16 frames a second plus sound, with the length of movie only limited by the CD memory available. So on a blank CD you have a minimum of 6 minutes recording for a high quality movie and a maximum of 90 minutes recording a standard quality movie.
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| It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 …Take the picture, | take the CD out of the camera, | …into the drive! |
The camera is large but surprisingly light and the price of over £500 may be too much for some budgets. However, the ICT team at the Cricket Road Centre have bought this camera, so if you would like to have a closer look or see it in action then please contact us.
On line cost of £509 (ex Vat) via : http://www.dabs.com/
Futher reviews available via :
http://www.steves-digicams.com/2002_reviews/cd400.html
http://www.camera-reviews.co.uk/sony-mvc-cd-400-digital-camera-reviews.html
