The Sony Mavica FD91 was the first digital camera I ever owned! I used it the last couple years of high school and during a short homestay in Japan. You could pick up a giant box of 3.5" floppies for cheap, and as long as you fed it a stead supply of batteries it worked pretty well.

Here are some photos I took that are at, I believe, the highest quality setting (1024 x 768 and about 170kb each). Though I think Lemmy shows them shrunk down in the feed, if you open the image in a new tab you can see the full resolution.

Zoomed in.

And a closeup.

The 14x optical zoom was pretty amazing back then.

I’m really bad at arithmetic so it took me two years to do the calculations, but the math does check out.

When I first moved to Japan over twenty years ago they were already about a hundred years ahead of typical US toilet/bath technology. For me, using one of these faucets where you can just set the temperature by number was like Liko getting beamed from her hut directly onto the damn Enterprise.

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Can they add a little speaker and have it play some smooth jazz when unzipping?

Randall Munroe has joined the conversation

I just got back from visiting my parents who were struggling to fix an unreliable dishwasher that keeps clogging, fails to dry, stinks, etc. This is PERFECT timing for that video!

A similar machine also plays a role in the 1997 movie Contact.

Hewn

Am I a psychopath for preferring to use a pen, even if it means I have to cross things out every now and then?

If this was filmed in the late sixties using an older orthicon camera it might be an artifact of the way that the image is produced.

I’m just going from memory, but I believe the tubes used a brightness-amplifying screen kept charged with electrons that, when struck by light, would result in a brighter image that could be scanned by a beam. The downside of this technique is that a very bright area would suck up electrons from around it faster than they could recharge, resulting in a dark halo.

I think I remember some of the oldest classic Doctor Who episodes has this visual artifact, as well as some old Beatles TV recordings.