Sony Mavaca

by Jerry
(Utah)

It was a 320X240 pixel CCD model, recorded 8 photos on a floppy disc.

As I remember it, the price was $10,000! As an engineering tool, it revolutionized data gathering at the time.

As I recall it was 1986 or 1987 that we purchased it.


Thanks for the submission Jerry.

Sony's first digital cameras were indeed expensive, and low resolution by today’s standards.

But as Jerry states, at the time they were revolutionary in so many ways.

The very early Mavicas were digital stills cameras (the images were viewed on screen, rather than printed out), and used floppy discs.

Later models progressed; the number of pixels increased, LCD screens were included and prices came sown. But they always stuck to one key feature – the ability to use discs for storage.

Going back a few years this was important because computers always had floppy disc drives (and then CD drives), so images could be transferred easily.

When memory cards were introduced, certainly the memory capacity increased, but the ability to simply load up images onto a computer was lost. If you didn’t have the right memory card reader or cable plugged into your computer you struggled to transfer images.

More recently computers are being sold with memory card slots as standard, so the cable/card reader problems should be a thing of the past.

Thanks again Jerry for your submission.