Great first digital camera

We got this shortly after our daughter was born so that we could keep our parents up to date. It was our first digital camera. We went with it partially because it records on cheap 3.5" floppy disks, which you can buy anywhere, and it makes transferring pix onto your computer a total snap. While I am fairly technically adept, my wife is not, so we wanted something that both of us could easily use.

The picture quality is very good. There are several different options for picture size, and it also has an "email" function that creates a really small shot that is good for sending by email, especially to recipients that do not have broadband. I have not printed out any of these pictures, but some people who have received them from us have, and to be honest the quality of the "email" pix is not that good. Once you move up to the larger size shots, the print quality improves dramatically, but you also eat up floppy disks a lot faster. You can get about 25 shots at the lowest setting, but only about 10 in the medium setting, which I think is the miniumum that you would need for decent prints.

The biggest drawback to this is camera is the size and weight. Granted, a big part of that is because it uses the floppy disk medium, so it is inherently a big machine, especially when you compare it to Sony's own Cybershots or the Canon Elph.

Also, it takes a while to write to the floppy, so you have to wait about 7 seconds between shots. By that time, the moment may have passed, especially when a baby is the subject.

Also, we have a friend who owns an older Mavica (FD75 I think) and her's came with a separate charger. Ours is charged by directly plugging the camera into the AC adapter, which takes the camera out of commission, no? We also have a Sony camcorder which uses the same batteries, so if the battery dies on the camera while I'm using it, and I still want to shoot, I can recharge using the camcorder. Still, it would've been nice for Sony to continue packaging the separate charger with the camera like they used to.

***12/3/02 UPDATE***

I can say, now that we've had this for several months, that the size and weight of this camera is a real drag. As I pointed out above, the floppy disk medium is what attracted us to this camera in the first place, but now that flash memory cards are so large and relatively inexpensive (I just got a 64MB SD card for my Palm m125 for about $35 after rebate), I think it might have been a mistake to get this very bulky and heavy camera instead of a more updated and smaller camera with a USB. Oh well, live and learn.

***12/18/02 UPDATE***

I just got a color injet printer (see my review of the Lexmark Z22) and have fired off a few prints on photo paper. I now clearly see the limitations of a 1.3 megapixel camera. Photos that looked absolutely amazing on the screen printed out fine. Photos that were either blurry or pixelated on the screen printed out pretty poorly. Like I said above, this is a great first digital camera but we seem to have outgrown it pretty quickly.