Only problem is, then you have to edit out the fingers.

This $499 camera is at the low end of the models. It looks pretty much like the old FD71. It still does 640x480, not the mega-pixels of the higher end models, but they’ve improved a lot of things. For the original article on the FD71 by Larry Anders, go to our web site and view the article at the link http://www.tpcug.org/reviews/mavica.html.

Three things stand out about this model. First, it’s very much lighter in weight. Second, the floppy disk is much, much faster, and, third, it snaps pictures faster. The obvious advantage to a floppy is the ease of transferring pictures to your PC. Insert the diskette and drag.

In case you’re new to the subject, Sony has taken a different approach to storing the images. All the models (and there are a lot of them) have a slot for floppy disks. Depending on the format you want, one disk will store from one to forty images. Mostly you’ll store twenty.

There’s a "bitmap" format (.BMP) that takes nearly a whole diskette. When you take one of these, it puts the standard JPEG file on the disk, too. The one picture I tried this on, I did a slideshow of the two images, so it would flip from one to the other every two seconds, and then maximized to the full screen, and I just couldn’t tell one from the other (actually I couldn’t even tell when it flipped).

Sony calls this floppy drive "2X", and I can tell you that it’s a very welcome improvement. There are other improvements like adding a "series" file numbering option so that you don’t repeat the file number between diskettes, handy when you’re dragging more than one diskette’s worth to a single directory.

Other features: a 10X optical zoom, three levels of flash, and a half dozen pre-programmed modes that preset shutter speed and aperture. This model is cheap, slick and very easy to use.