Jurassic Tech: Sony Mavica Circa 1981

-It’s Jurassic Tech the podcast. In this first episode, our Todd Ogasawara takes us back to 1981 — to check out the Sony Mavica, the first camera with electronic storage built in.


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Duration: 34:34

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