For all of you Sony fans out there who just love using a digital camera that saves photos directly to floppy, Panasonic has a new camera for you.

As digital cameras have increased their photo resolution, file sizes have increased correspondingly. The problem is that a camera using standard floppy disks can hold only a few high-resolution photos. In fact, there are resolutions now possible that wouldn't fit on a floppy at all!

The Solution: Panasonic's PalmCam line of digital cameras now includes models that will save not to regular old floppy disks, but to SuperDisks instead.

Each SuperDisk, also known as LS-120, holds up to 120 MB, yet has the same physical dimensions as the standard floppy.

To the end-user this means two things:

1. A single SuperDisk will store about 83 times the data of a standard floppy. This translates into either more images per disk or to photos with much higher resolutions becoming possible.

2. Computers that are equipped with a SuperDisk drive can read both standard and LS-120 disks with the same drive!

It's important to note that not all computers have LS-120 drives. If the manufacture makes this option available it's typically for their notebooks.

As a real life example, I've used Twinhead notebooks for several years, and the last few I've owned have had the SuperDisk option. This simply means that I've one "floppy drive" in my notebook that will read and write to both standard disks and SuperDisk as well.

Bottom line: if you liked cameras that saved to floppy, you'll love the new Panasonic cameras!

Published: March 31, 2000

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