Sony Mavica


Mavica was a brand of Sony cameras which used removable disks as the main recording medium. On August 25th 1981, Sony unveiled a prototype of the Sony Mavica as the world's first electronic still camera.
As with all Mavica cameras until the early 1990s this first model was not digital. Its CCD sensor produced an analog video signal in the NTSC format at a resolution of pixels. Mavipak 2.0" disks were used to write 50 still frames onto tracks on disk. The pictures were viewed on a television screen. Otherwise, this camera is positioned as the "pioneer of the digital era".
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sony reused the Mavica name for a number of digital cameras that used standard 3.5" floppy disk or 8 cm CD-R media for storage.

Original analog Mavica models

The unreleased original MAVICA as well as the later ProMavica MVC-5000 and MVC-7000 were designed as single-lens reflex systems with interchangeable lenses. At least the ProMavica MVC-7000 also featured lens mount adapters for Nikon and Canon lenses. The VF format soon evolved into the backward-compatible Hi-VF format, supported by the ProMavica MVC-7000 and the Hi-Band Mavica models.

Digital Mavica line

From the late 1990s on, Sony released a number of cameras based on digital technology under the "Digital Mavica", "FD Mavica" and "CD Mavica" brands.
The earliest of these digital models recorded onto 3.5" 1.4 MiB 2HD floppy disks in computer-readable DOS FAT12 format, a feature that made them very popular in the North American market. With the evolution of consumer digital camera resolution, the advent of the USB interface and the rise of high-capacity storage media, Mavicas started to offer other alternatives for recording images: the floppy-disk Mavicas began to be Memory Stick compatible, and a new CD Mavica series—which used 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media—was released in 2000.
The first CD-based Mavica, notable also for its 10× optical zoom, could only write to CD-R discs, but it was able to use its USB interface to read images from CDs not finalized. Subsequent models are more compact, with a reduced optical zoom, and are able to write to CD-RW discs.
A couple of the models were formed with a single lens reflex component combined with an interchangeable lens. And to give them flexibility, one or two versions also had lens mount adapters.

Later Sony digital cameras

The Mavica line has been discontinued. Sony continues to produce digital cameras in the Cyber-shot and Alpha series, which use Memory Stick and other flash card technologies for storage.

Mavica models

Still video cameras with storage on 2.0" video floppy

There were other digital cameras that used disk storage as memory media: