Sony Mavica MVC-FD97 Digital Camera

I bought the Sony Digital Mavica MVC FD97 from the company that my mother works for. It had been just introduced to the market so I paid about $700.00 at the time. I was replacing a Sony Digital Mavica MVC FD73 that I used for about a year but was not happy with the picture quality, not even a full mega pixel. The FD97 has a huge lens on it measuring 52mm in diameter and sticks out aways from the camera body. It has two media bays, one for Floppy disks and one for Memory Sticks. If you use a floppy disk you can get about four high resolution pictures on a disk but the camera is automatically set to standard quality and the compression rate gets very high. If you use the Memory stick port (memory stick not included) the camera is set to fine quality and the compression ratio drops dramatically giving you much better pictures with less problems from compression artifacts. The lens is a 10X lens with a 2X digital zoom that can be deactivated to conserve battery power or if you don't need it. The zoom function on this camera is amazing and the other features, including steady shot (a feature found on Sony Camcorders) are also very handy. There is no full manual mode but you can adjust other aspects of the process with some help form the camera itself. There is a flash built in to the camera but if you have ever used a big flash you may think it on the weak side. The flash has three different intensity settings and has a red eye reduction setting as well. This camera can easily be used as a point and shoot or you can use the features on it and compose a fairly complicated shot. All in all the camera is a good buy for any intermediate range digital photographer or advanced beginner, it is a very forgiving camera that is easy to use.