Crap. Obsolescence is going places it shouldn't.

Crap. Obsolescence is going places it shouldn't.

It's been a year since I got the Sony CD-Mavica MVC-CD500 digicam as a graduation present from Auntie Carole and Uncle Butch, and, as my Multiply page will attest, it's seen regular use over the past year. It's actually a pretty good camera: full manual exposure control, decent fixed lens, MPEG-1 short-length video capability and a proper flash hot shoe on a 5-megapixel camera are all hard to beat. Unfortunately this early on I see signs that I won't be able to use it for much longer.

You see, the CD Mavica relies on 8cm (3.5-inch) CD-Rs and CD-RWs to record its images, not on solid-state memory cards like most other digital cameras since 2005. As such, it is limited to a maximum of 156MB per CD, and is also subject to the traditional bugbears of optical media such as long read/write time.

When I got the CD Mavica, I got around 20 CD-Rs and one CD-RW along with it. Since then I've been able to buy two more CD-RWs because I like the rewritability of the medium.

Now, the only way to truly erase content on a CD-RW is via formatting it, ergo wiping the whole CD clean. I found out the hard way just a few minutes ago that formatting can also sometimes render a CD-RW totally useless, like it did to two of my CD-RWs. Nowadays CD-RWs that small are ridiculously hard to find, as most discs that size are now DVD-Rs or DVD-RWs, so buying new ones isn't much of an option. (The ones I bought before I probably just got lucky with.)

Still with me are the 8cm CD-Rs that came with my camera, although I did use a few of them for non-Mavica purposes. That leaves me with 15 blank CD-Rs, and nowadays it's increasingly hard to find them in that size, too.

In a nutshell, I have three problems with the CD Mavica.

1. Increasingly hard-to-find storage media.
2. Lack of repair support here...as it's really a US model.
3. Destroyed CD-RW media due to formatting.

All these basically point to one thing: I'll have to replace it sooner rather than later if I plan to continue being an amateur photographer like I am now. After hearing Tita Vik's news of her getting a brand-new Canon EOS 30D digital SLR for something like PhP60,000, I'm beginning to wonder if getting one of those will be a viable option for myself in the future...

That's the thing I despised with the arrival of digital cameras, particularly digital SLRs. With the Nikon FM, I was confident that as long as there is film, I could use it and not be subject to the obsession with obsolescence the technology world has. Now that film is on the wane and I've succumbed to the lure of digital photography, I'm subject to the same ridiculously short time limits that dictate "your equipment is obsolete" all too soon.

At least Nikon made sure my existing lenses will be future-proof...so if I'm ever in the market for a digital SLR it'll probably be a Nikon for me. I'm suddenly a little jealous of Adrian's Nikon D50...