aNewDomain — In 1981 Kent Ekberg was a corporate planner for Sony America, trying to figure out a brand new market in photography. Check out the Sony Mavica, below. It was the first still camera with electronic storage.
The Mavica was actually an analog TV video camera — the pics on the early models all were at 570×490 resolution, the same as an NTSC standard television. The name Mavica — the protoype was MAVICA, short for MAgnetic VIdeo CAmera — stuck.
The Mavica let you store up to 50 photos at a time on custom 2-inch mini discs. When the Mavica MVC 5000 and 7000 came out two years later, the storage discs were Sony standard 3.5-inch discs, the same ones introduced with Apple’s original Mac in 1984.
Still later models stored pics on writeable CDs. These later models were SLRs with interchangeable lenses. Sony offered a printer to provide color prints.
See Jurassic Tech: Todd O’s Sony Mavica FD71 Circa 1998
