HELP Mavica CD300

You can download the latest Sony driver here. Since the camera is over a decade old it's unlikely Sony or anybody else will be writing new drivers for it.

Yours is a CD recording type. Shouldn't you just load the CD from the camera to the computer? Then cut and paste to a folder on your computer. Or copy and paste. Ed

Okie-tex, Why yes you can reset your cd300 back to the factory settings. On the bottom of the camera underneath the on and off button for your LCD is a little hole and it says reset next to it. Insert a straight pin into that hole and it will reset everything back to factory settings. Fellow Texan

for average still shots, do I need to constantly monitor & adjust scene selection (twilight, landscape, portrait)? No, just leave it on the little teal colored camera. If you want to use the scene selections then it must be on SCN. I unfortunately spent a lot of time when I first got this camera switching between scenes without putting it on SCN - so it didn't really change scenes! Also, when switching modes, must I turn camera off before rotating mode dial? No

The camera is not megabytes (MB) but megapixel (MP), there is a big difference. If you multiply the horizontal resolution by the vertical resolution then that will be how many megapixels are being captured. So in this case, max resolution 2048 x 1536 = 3145728 which is 3.1 MP effective. I don't think any camera actually captures exactly the full MP listed on the camera. Now, if each pixel was represented by a byte then you would have 3.1 MegaByte picture captured. However, each pixel is represented by I think 3 bytes which would give you a 9.3 Megabyte picture captured. However, since this is usually to large for most users to deal with, compression is introduced thus the settings for fine and standard. The tiff picture type is the 9.3 Megabyte photo with no compression. For most of us this isn't very effective for working with so we use the jpg compression. This reduces the picture to a more manageable size for saving, manipulation and storing. Keep in mind that this is what is called a 'lossy' compression which means that it actually removes pixels from the photograph and uses a technique called interpolation to bring the pixels back later.

I don't have that camera, but try Macro mode instead of Conversions Lens in setup. If the camera focuses (at Wide setting), then you should be able to get down into the wider apertures.

The problem is in your ISO. The camera has a terrible noise problem at anything over 100 ISO. I set my camera to 100 even when shooting in auto, and never use any other ISO setting - the results are just not worth it. Hang in there. The camera is awesome and you will make friends with it. The settings are really not that complicated once you get used to them. Just decrease your shutter speed and increase your aperature (lowest number) when in low light conditions and watch the LCD until it looks good (you might have to half press the shutter to get a preview), until you get a bettter grasp of what those adjustments are doing for you. Good luck, Cindy

wow did you get an amazing deal on the camera? lol... to buy it with nothing? check sony's website, they must have a link to download the drivers for the mac. I presume you'd need to download something to be able to read sony formatted disks on a mac.

While it is no help for those with other cameras, Sony has fixed the problem with the FD91 which has a viewfinder that is not bothered by sunlight. The F505 LCD evidently works good in sunlight.

Even though Sony Mavica digital cameras are listed as compatible with iPhoto, the camera has to be set to Picture-Transfer-Protocol (PTP) before you can download. In addition, you will need to open Image Capture in the Applications folder. As soon as these steps are taken, the camera is recognized by iPhoto and all photos downloaded into Image Capture.