Digital camera -Sony Mavica FD71

Jewelry Discussion
1

Hi all, I have the opportunity to buy a used Sony Mavica FD71 at a
pretty cheap price. My question is; Is it good enough to photograph
jewellery for web pages? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Don
http://www.mjgd.com.au
dmac@mjgd.com.au

2

Don - I wouldn’t recommend that camera for close up photography. It
doesn’t have a very high pixel rating (only 640x480)and you can’t get
close enough to jewelry for good results.

  • Wendy
3 
    Hi all, I have the opportunity to buy a used Sony Mavica FD71
at a pretty cheap price. My question is; Is it good enough to
photograph jewellery for web pages? Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

G’day; my son has a Mavica and for what he wants to do, it is
excellent and most convenient - he is a Government property valuer.

However, in my opinion, for jewellery you need better resolution than
the Mavica can provide. I use a Canon S20 with a resolution of 3.2
megapixels, and suggest you need something like that quality for ultra
closeups. The Mavica records in a ‘lossy’ jpeg format, but it isn’t
difficult to convert to another format like png for saving. I make a
two copies of photos; one in png compression which loses nothing of
the picture, and I save in that format. I make a jpeg downsized copy
for use in email, etc,. which doesn’t take all day for the poor
recipient to download. The ideal, I suppose is a Nikon 995, but I’m
not too sure whether it is worth the higher cost. Whatever you buy,
get extra batteries; that little digital viewfinder screen at the back
is hell on power! – Cheers now,

John Burgess; @John_Burgess2 of Mapua Nelson NZ

4

These pics were shot with a Mavica with a close up filter. Use you own
judgement as to quality. Not good for print work, but I think fine for
webwork.

http://www.goldwerx.com/Mvc-806f.jpg
http://www.goldwerx.com/Mvc-809f.jpg
http://www.goldwerx.com/Mvc-728f.jpg
http://www.goldwerx.com/Mvc-544f.jpg
5

Hi Donald, Some people, including myself, will tell you that the Sony
Mavica picture quality is compromised in order to provide the
convenience of floppy disk storage. Technically speaking, the Nikon or
Olympus cameras provide much clearer photos with less JPEG artifacts.
But, for the web I would have to say that the Mavica would be more
than adequate. It depends on how good a price you are getting.

It's only fair to say that these technological goodies get obsolete

mighty quickly, so if you are being offered a camera that is two years
old, take into account that for only a few hundred more you can get a
dramatic increase in quality and reliability in a newer camera, and
that your seller might be upgrading his or her system, and wants to
unload this to get some of their investment out, usually more than it
is actually worth. Also, these things aren’t that durable.

bye!
-Drew
Andrew Horn
Designer,
Fiodh Furniture Company
105 Seaview St.
Port Hueneme, CA 93041
www.fiodh.com