When the 3 1/4-in floppy camera came out I wanted one. It was not in my budget. But a decade and a half ago a friend gave me one. It worked. It came with two batteries and three floppies.
Yesterday a different friend gave me one as well. It came with one battery. That battery is the same as the other batteries.
I went from a person who couldn’t afford anything back in the day to a person who’s just being handed these priceless artifacts.
They both work. The only device I can read the disk on are the cameras themselves because I have no floppy drives.
Sony Mavica FD91 and FD81
These were horrible cameras that sold like crazy back then. Because a diskette only held 1.44MB and the write speed of floppies was so slow, Sony compresses the hell out of the images to that you can fit a higher number of images on a diskette and so that they write to the diskette quick enough to take the next picture.
The result was really poor quality images out of these on the settings that everyone used.
Can confirm, had one on semi-perma-loan for a few years. Bought a secondhand Canon from a friend and never looked back.
These Mavicas could become popular again now as retro tech. There’s a lo-fi aesthetic growing in photo and video that’s all about compression artefacts and old image sensors. Physical media and its inconveniences is also having a moment as a novelty and maybe even a broader movement.