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A Few Caveats

Each "virgin" CD-R disc must be initialized before use, which takes about 12 seconds. Shooting stills and videos is similar to operating many other digital cameras, except that saving each image as an uncompressed TIFF file takes about 37 seconds (at least twice the save time of other high-performance cameras using different media). Saving the same images as JPEGs completes in less than 4 seconds.

Here's the tricky part: Every CD must also be "finalized" (burned with a file directory) while it's still in the camera, before it can be read by your computer. Finalizing takes about 50 seconds, and every time finalizing is done, it subtracts 13.5MB of space from the CD, no matter how few shots you've taken. This becomes critical if you plan to shoot pictures, download the images to your computer, and then pop the same CD back into the camera for more shooting. By finalizing several times during testing, I severely reduced the CD's 156MB capacity--which can theoretically capture nearly 1100 stills and 1.5 hours of video (at the lowest possible quality settings)--to a grand total of only 21 JPEGs, 12 TIFFs, and ten 15-second MPEG movies before the disc was full.

Most CD-ROM drive trays come with an indentation for 3-inch discs, but Sony provides a 5.25-inch adapter for CD drives that don't have one. In addition to Universal Serial Bus drivers and CD-R utilities, the Mavica ships with Sony's PictureGear for photo management, MGI PhotoSuite 8.0 for image editing, and MGI VideoWave SE+ for video editing.

A Good Performer

The Mavica MVC-CD1000 is an innovative device sure to find a niche market among business users and others who need high-volume capacity and wide compatibility. But its bulk means it's probably not the camera you'll want to take on your next vacation.