January 1998
From: Emil Volcheck To: All Subj: 1/9/98 PC/64/128 meetingThe main topic for today's meeting was a show and tell on the SONY Mavica-MD7 digital camera. This camera is being sold for around $700, you can look for sales prices!
Charles Curran showed the system off for us - and everything worked! The Mavica has a 640x480 color CCD chip (renders in 24-bit color). Has a 10:1 zoom lens, auto focus, auto exposure. It can focus from about 3 inches to infinity - real wide range! Has manual controlled flash. You have a 2x1.5" active matrix LCD screen on the back of the camera, as the viewfinder.
He showed us the many picture taking modes the camera has - took asome live shots in the meeting room - as well as a potfull of test exposure made prior to the meeting.
This camera is unitque in that it stores it images on a standard 3.5-inch high density floppy. So, you take the pix, eject the disk and plug it into your PC (or Mac) and away you go. No memory cards, no image downloading and the medium is essentially free! And it works like a charm!
No software comes with the camera as it stores its images as jpeg files which can be manipulated by your favorite image processing software. For the meeting, Charlie used the "Kodak Picture Disk" software which is conveniently available.
The images displayed on his laptop were also displayed on the large screen TV in the meeting room via a VGA-to-S-video converter - which did an acceptable job (you can not do great with a TV).
If you are in the market for a digital camera, this one deserves your consideration. The attendees were all quite impressed (tho I don't think anyone ran out to buy!).
We really thank Charlie for showing off one of his newer toys!!!
Emil .....
This Special Season's Meeting In the absence of our usual November or December flea market meeting, we thought it appropriate to do something else special. So, we decided to make this time round a more informal session - with some different kind of "entertainment"! We urge everyone to come round, visit and RENEW!
64/128 Users First up - we plan to feast with goodies everyone who comes. That'll be danish and deli, with coffee and sodas. We also plan to have door prizes each half hour. There will be a prize choice each time for BOTH Amiga and 8-bit folks. At 11:45 we will have a 50/50 drawing - tickets are $1, or 6 for $5. In between the munching and drawing, we plan on: seasonal sound, a Windows 95 video, demo of the 15th Anniversary picture disk, a surprise and maybe more! Attendees are invited to bring show stuff, too. Plus, opportunities for foks to talk, ask questions and (we hope!) help.
Amiga Users With the coming of December, our Holiday meeting will be upon us. Come on out and join us for what should be a good time as this will be a quite casual meeting. We will have some discussion of monitors and screenmodes so as to keep you informed in your decision making process for the holiday season, if you decide to enhance your computer world viewing pleasure with a monitor upgrade.