Sony Mavica: Көне камералар тарихы

Discontinued brand of Sony cameras

Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera) is a discontinued brand of Sony cameras which use removable disks as the main recording medium. On August 25, 1981, Sony unveiled a prototype of the Sony Mavica as the world's first electronic still video camera. Sony also demonstrated a thermal transfer printer called the Mavigraph, employing cyan, magenta, yellow and black dye transfer sheets and capable of producing prints of up to 120mm x 160mm on A5 paper, made up of the 480 lines from the captured images, in a five minute process. 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.

From the late 1990s on, Sony released a number of cameras based on digital (rather than analog) 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 (megapixels), 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 (FD) Mavicas began 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 used 8 cm (3") CD R/CD RW media—was released in 2000. The first CD based Mavica (MVC CD1000), 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 (CDs with incomplete sessions). 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.

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.

Sony MAVICA (1981) (Mavipak 2.0" VF, SLR design, 3 lenses, several prototypes)
Sony Mavica MVC A7AF (1987) (Mavipak 2.0" VF)
Sony Hi Band Mavica MVC C1 (1988) (Mavipak 2.0" Hi VF)
Sony ProMavica MVC 2000 1989) (Mavipak 2.0" Hi VF)
Sony Hi Band Mavica MVC A10 (1989) (Mavipak 2.0" Hi VF)
Sony ProMavica MVC 2010 (1990) (Mavipak 2.0" VF Hi VF)
Sony ProMavica MVC 5000 (1990) (Mavipak 2.0" VF, SLR design, various lenses)
Sony ProMavica MVC 7000 (1992) (Mavipak 2.0" Hi VF, SLR design, 5 lenses, 2 lens adapters)

Sony MaviCap MVC FDR1 (storage on 3.5" floppy)
Sony MaviCap MVC FDR3 (storage on 3.5" floppy)