Apr 10, 2008
Retiring the old Mavica
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
retired my Sony Mavica CD-1000 this month — just in case I had not told you already. The Mavica was my camera from 2000 to early this year, and it was really showing its age.
While it did take some great pictures over the years, it was very limited. Manual focus did not really work, and auto-focus always chose the wrong subject for every image. My first three years with the camera were spent learning how to trick it into doing what it should have been smart enough to do.
Still, it had some incredible mileage. I filled more than 40 CDs with its images, and still have a spindle of an extra 30 Mavica CDs left over. Unfortunately, since the advent of SD and CF cards, those CDs are increasingly difficult to find, and lugging around a camera with a built-in CD burner just shows what a relic the device was.
So what has replaced it? A Nikon D40X.
I know. I know. I have people walk up to me on the street every time I am snapping pictures who tell me I should have bought a D3. And I would have — if I had $4,999 to blow. I am poor, and the D40X provides the most bang for my buck. While it may have some issues with violet points, its incredible sensor is capable of capturing immense images.
One of my biggest gripes with the old Mavica was image size. Compared to the old floppy disk Mavicas that maxed at 640×480, sure, it had a huge resolution. But 2.1 megapixels hardly gets you into the 8×10 portrait range, let along wall hangings.
I remember when Dolly Moiseeff took me on as an intern at The Oakland Press. She told me how beautiful my photos were, and how I should really think of printing one out as a wall hanging. I would have loved to do that, but with 2.1 megapixels, that beautiful picture would be a blurry mess of shit at anything less than 20 feet away. My apartment isn’t even big enough where you could stand 20 feet away from a picture!
So, the Nikon is here to stay. My girlfriend and I ordered a used Nikon 1980s long-range lens, but its connector has a problem and we need to send it back to the seller. For the time being, I am stuck with the kit lens. But the kit lens is more than enough to get some great shots.
The following pictures are up on my DeviantArt page already, and hopefully more will follow as I get through picking apart and cleaning up each image.
