Sony Mavica

Mavica is a Sony Corporation brand of cameras which use removable disks as the main recording media. The brand is most associated with digital cameras that record on floppy disks, but the name was first used for a line of analog still video cameras announced in 1981, and there were later digital models that recorded onto CDs.

The first Digital Mavicas recorded onto floppy, a feature that made them very popular on North-American market. But with the evolution of consumer digital cameras resolution (megapixels), the advent of USB interface and the rising of high-capacity storage media, Mavicas started to offer other alternatives for recording images: the floppy-disk (FD) Mavicas begun to be Memory Stick compatible (initially through a Memory Stick Floppy Disk adapter, but ultimately through a dedicated Memory Stick slot), and a new CD Mavica series — which uses 8cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.

The first CD Mavica (MVC-CD1000), notable also for its 10x optical zoom, could only write to CD-R discs, but it was able to use its USB interface to read images from incomplete sessions. Subsequent models are more compact and have a reduced optical zoom, but are able to write to CD-RW discs.