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Old 14th Jun 2017, 9:42 am   #161
Radio Wrangler
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The school wasn't the target market for the Mavica. Sony were after the press market where a grotty picture wouldn't be too bad given typical newsprint processes, but speed could be everything. It didn't succeed as a big seller, but it did successfully prove a market existed and Sony seem to be doing quite well in that market nowadays.

Things were moving very quickly indeed. Everything was obsolete if you blinked

Once upon a time I was experimenting with using silhouettes to mask a UV eraser on an Eprom and to try to recover the picture from the data remaining.

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Old 14th Jun 2017, 9:51 am   #162
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I was given the Canon version of that, the RC-260 literally a year after it was released as it was obsolete and worth nothing. Horrible piece of technology!

http://camera-wiki.org/wiki/Canon_RC-260

I still have the Praktica mtl5 that I was using at the time and it still works fine although I don't use it that much. It's amazing how analogue mediums persist and digital ones don't.
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 10:48 am   #163
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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It's amazing how analogue mediums persist and digital ones don't.
Indeedy... I used my Pentax MX until a few years ago alongside my digital cameras. I stopped using it, but still have it although I sold all lenses other than the 50mm it came with. Film processing has become a bit 'come-day-go-day' and was so inconsistent that disappointment ensued occasionally and if the negative is damaged, there's no point.

I might come over all nostalgic sometime hence and run a slide film through it: Sixteen pee-a-picture makes one think before pressing the shutter.

A decent 35mm SLR can be had for thirty quid in a charity shop but I've never seen an old digital camera for sale yet.

I'm pretty sure there was a 35mm film camera made for a short time (Vivitar?) that had an LCD screen on the back so you could see what you'd taken. I'd regard that as a suitable candidate for the Museum of Failure.

The Mavica was used at the school until about 2005. I can see the attraction for the press market.
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 12:16 pm   #164
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

My father taught me how to do film processing at home, colour and black and white. I spent most of my teen years knee deep in bottles of Ilford chemicals fumbling around in the dark. That was because of the aforementioned commercial film processing failures, particularly with black and white as they had absolutely no idea how long to expose the paper for. Oh and periodically getting someone else's photographs. Perhaps that belongs in the museum of failure!

The iPhone I use now has supplanted my previous Nikon DSLR for most things as it's actually pretty good as much as I hate saying it, plus it was cheaper than repairing the DSLR when I dropped it
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 12:20 pm   #165
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Veering off the subject but there's the rolls royce vulture aero engine, the twenty-four cylinder unit is one of their few engineering failures, out of it's demise and the avro Manchester bomber it was fitted to came the legendary Lancaster.
Not a failure as such, once the problem with the connecting rods had been identified a solution was soon arrived at. By then, the Merlin was in huge demand and resources were better directed at improving this and not developing the Vulture further. The Exe, an air cooled 24 cylinder X block engine worked perfectly reliably.
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 1:00 pm   #166
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Would failure be quantified by:

The amount of users who are left with un-usable kit?

The development cost of the failed project?

The quantity of material published, before it was pulled, to tell us how good it was?
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 1:06 pm   #167
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

If it's Sinclair, all of the above!
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 1:56 pm   #168
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I would define failure as the point at which whatever was turned out or dreamt up hurt the company financially and / or reputatationally.
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 7:42 pm   #169
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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Veering off the subject but there's the rolls royce vulture aero engine, the twenty-four cylinder unit is one of their few engineering failures.
This must surely count as the craziest British aero-engine design delusion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Nomad

Thankfully the world moved on and Whittle's jets became the things-everyone-wanted to power their airplanes.
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Old 14th Jun 2017, 11:18 pm   #170
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I think I agree about the Sony Mavica digital camera.

Back in the mid 1990s I wanted one. It seemed a fantastic idea. Take pictures and store them on 3.5" floppy disks (another Sony invention) which at that time were cheap and ubiquitous. Pictures were saved in .JPG format and could be easily loaded into a computer - back then, every PC had a floppy drive. You could then print them, e-mail them to family or friends or upload them to a web site - the latest technological development.

I didn't buy one at the time, as the digital cameras were initially quite expensive. But technology moved on very fast. The Sony Mavica produced pictures of 640x480 resolution (about 0.3 megapixels) - just about good enough for web pages or snapshot size prints. As digital cameras improved, the number of pixels rapidly became higher. At the same time, flash memory became much cheaper. Very quickly, floppy disks became obsolete, too small to store high quality digital photos. Despite this, Sony carried on making floppy disk digital cameras for some time, presumably to get a return on their investment. In the same way, Sony continued making pocket TVs with the "flat" black and white CRT they developed, even though colour TV had become the norm by then.

Years later I picked up a Sony Mavica FD-5 (their first model) camera for next to nothing at a car boot sale. Amazingly it was still working, but I soon discovered that picture quality wasn't one of its strong points. Nonetheless, I plan to keep it in case one day it becomes a valuable antique first digital camera. After all, the first television sets now fetch high prices. Could other obsolete items become valuable?
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 6:13 am   #171
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

How about Apples "QuickTake" digital cameras? Introduced in 1994, went through three iterations and was quietly dropped in 97.
I had a 150 model.
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 9:09 am   #172
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I remember these early digital cameras. I was working in a research lab at the time and we had various ones: the Apple Quicktake, the Sony Mavica and the Casio QV-10. None of them took very good pictures, but I wouldn't class any of them as failures. They made instant digital photography possible. That was revolutionary. Visiting the CeBIT trade fair in the mid-90s, I was able to take pictures using one of those cameras, write up the day's visit, and publish it to the Web via remote dialup (coding the HTML by hand!) so that my colleagues could read it the same evening. These days such things are taken for granted, but at the time it was barely distinguishable from magic.

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Old 15th Jun 2017, 12:19 pm   #173
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

The Hoover "Buy a Vac and get a long-haul holiday" deal? (Well ..... that was successful, as was the corresponding increase in vac sales - but it still bust the company!)
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 3:00 pm   #174
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

I have a Mavica. We used one at work for site survey pictures, it was ideal for that, succeeding a Polaroid. The 0.5 MP sounds trivial by modern standards, but it's surprisingly adequate for general purpose use. I bought one cheaply and used it a fair bit, even for holiday snaps, but all three batteries I have have died and probably won't be replaced. Not a failure by any means, just obsolete like videos.
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 3:44 pm   #175
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

My wife brought a Sony Mavica(?) camera home from school one day (she is a teacher) and I was quite impressed. Not sure which exact model it was but it was a large, black and chunky thing which used floppies for storage. It had two modes: 640x480 and HD. The 640 pics looked a bit gritty but the HD ones looked very nice to my eyes. IIRC, the floppy could store 4 standard pics but only one HD one.

We also had a Rabbit Phone. My mate Ian worked for the company that designed them back in the 90's and he gave me one of the early production models. It worked, but seemed poorly sorted. Any data glitch produced a loud clanging sound in your ear and recovery was not always perfect. I wish I'd kept it now!
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 4:08 pm   #176
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

It has been mentioned before but the disc camera could be considered a failure. I got one for my Mum as a foolproof way for her to take pictures (except that they were always half a frame to the right but no camera could correct that!).
The results were dreadful - grainy and dull. Eventually after many complaints the poor user could send the camera back to Kodak and they provided you with a new film camera. Not sure if it was free or for a nominal charge.
There have been lots of failures in the quest for the flat screen TV. Beam-indexing systems with 90-degree bending and (you might argue) the Slimfit ultra-heavy Samsung CRT, though the final version of it wasn't all that bad and stood up well against the first LCD sets.
The Hitachi 'Instavision' CRT wasn't exactly a success and must have cost the company a lot as we were swapping CRTs for conventional types many years after they were launched - and getting paid for it too! Also the Sony precursor to the Trinitron system didn't fare too well - what was it called?
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 4:12 pm   #177
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

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(you might argue) the Slimfit ultra-heavy Samsung CRT, though the final version of it wasn't all that bad and stood up well against the first LCD sets.
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I have one of those in daily use. It was abandoned by a tenant. The picture was very narrow and it took me a while to suss, with the help of forum members, that a magnet had dropped off the top of one of the inductors. My only complaint is that I've never found a way to connect an HD source to it.
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 5:25 pm   #178
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 8:41 pm   #179
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

On the digital camera (posts 170, 171) the biggest mistake must be Kodak they invented it then failed to launch to protect their film business, now where are they?
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Old 15th Jun 2017, 11:34 pm   #180
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Default Re: Museum of failure.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew2 View Post
My wife brought a Sony Mavica(?) camera home from school one day (she is a teacher) and I was quite impressed. Not sure which exact model it was but it was a large, black and chunky thing which used floppies for storage. It had two modes: 640x480 and HD. The 640 pics looked a bit gritty but the HD ones looked very nice to my eyes. IIRC, the floppy could store 4 standard pics but only one HD one.

We also had a Rabbit Phone. My mate Ian worked for the company that designed them back in the 90's and he gave me one of the early production models. It worked, but seemed poorly sorted. Any data glitch produced a loud clanging sound in your ear and recovery was not always perfect. I wish I'd kept it now!
The sony ruvi analogue movie camera must surely be considered a failure, the almost pocket sized device used sealed cartridges that contained a crude tape transport system complete with video drum etc but only a short amount of tape, they seemed totally pointless even at the time and disappeared without trace shortly thereafter.
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