formatting floppy disks for sony digital mavica

It became the first in a highly successful series of cameras that saw it dominate sales, especially in the US. I reviewed it in the October 1997 issue of Personal Computer World magazine in the UK (see below), concluded it was an inspired move by Sony and gave it a recommended award. The prototype was used in the Los Angeles Olympics and developed into a commercial series sold in the late Eighties to early Nineties.īut this story is about the first Digital Mavica, the FD5, launched in 1997 for around 500 pounds or $600. Arguably the first electronic stills camera, Sony named it the Magnetic Video Camera, or Mavica for short. Back in 1981, Sony developed a prototype based on an analogue video camera that recorded stills rather than motion and stored them onto 2in video floppy disks. They were the first Digital Mavicas to use 3.5in floppy disks, but they weren’t the first Mavica cameras altogether. Sony launched Digital Mavica with two models: the MVC-FD5 with a fixed lens and the MVC-FD7 with a 10x optical zoom. But Sony had a cunning plan and in 1997 launched a range of cameras that used neither: instead the new Digital Mavica series would record their photos onto bog-standard 3.5in floppy disks which could be slotted into virtually any computer of the time. The earliest consumer digital cameras faced a catch 22 when it came to storage: either adopt prohibitively expensive memory cards or use built-in memory with limited capacity, then force owners to deal with complicated cables and software to access their photos.

Formatting floppy disks for sony digital mavica