I have a 25 year old Sony CD Mavica camera that uses CD/R or CD/RW discs to record pictures. You can only buy them in 50 packs. That would last me approximately 500 years. Who uses these in bulk?
They were a lot more popular before memory cards came in. You can still use them to store photos or documents and make music CD mixes that are about six songs long.
Caution, some standard CD trays don’t like mini CDs.
My first thought would be a band who wants to give out a small album of music. Maybe even only one song. CDs are more common than you might think, instead of just putting the music for free on Bandcamp or similar.
Options for buying CD media are less diverse than they were in the heyday of the technology - it used to be the case that you could buy small recordable CDs in non-bulk quantities; I remember getting some that were rectangular, the size of a business card - but because they had to have the standard sized spindle hole in the middle, they only had a tiny capacity like 42MB or something
210 MB is like what, 50-100 pictures? Or maybe one short clip? That’s not that much. A busy photographer would go through 50 of them in a week.
Coasters for shot glasses and other really small drinks?
The CD Mavicas only had quite low resolution - I think at the lowest level of compression, the images still came in under 1MB per photo
My 28 megapixel camera produces 45MB RAW files
Exactly. I just looked through my early 2000s photos, and they’re all under 1 megabyte each. The old ca. 1999 digital camera took ones that were 1152 x 864 and that took up about 300k each.
The slightly later (2001) Canon S110 Digital ELPH took 1600x1200 photos (~2 mp) that take up about 700 k each.
And a MP3 of the era was something like 3-5 megabytes, based on looking at the old ones I’ve got in my MP3 directory. And in CD format (.wav), a 210 mb CD is still 25 minutes or so of audio.
So 210 mb was a pretty reasonable amount of space for the era, but quickly became unusable as file sizes grew. By 2007 or so, an average camera took a 8 mp image that takes up a full 2 mb.
Nowadays, they’re hardly usable; images are still 2-3 megabytes each (12 mp Samsung S23 Ultra photos), but videos get big FAST, and you can’t store that many 2.5 mb photos on a 210 MB disc anyway.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame - some of the cameras in the Mavica range had really good build quality and decent lenses and such, but they are just low resolution cameras. I imagine with sufficient hacking skills, someone could swap out the internals and fit a decent sensor and upgraded storage.
Back when I used to go to computer/networking/AV trade shows they were oftentimes passing out those 8cm/3"+ mini CD discs for demo software and what not.
I can attest that if you don’t need the full capacity of 12cm discs that they are a lot easier to carry around.
If you look at a standard slide-out tray CD/DVD reader you will note there’s a depression below the main space to hold these.
OTOH, most slot feed readers like car stereos have a real problem with them. And putting them in a sideways mounted tray reader is likely to be a real problem.
There’s a lot of fans of retro tech out there nowadays. If they have an old digital camera or some such those discs can come in handy. (I just saw a digital camera at a thrift store yesterday that used 3.5" floppies. So these small discs are a huge improvement over those.)
(I just checked my DVD-writer to see it’s configuration. I haven’t used it in so long that it took quite a few button presses to get the tray to eject.)
I love this camera. Takes great pictures at 800x600. Sizes average between 300K - 800K. I finally found 10-packs. I knew I had seen them last time I looked… but now they’re 3/4 way down the search results for “10-pack 210MB CD” Good job Amazon.