CD Mavica: Sony's Weird CD Burning Digital Cameras!
Sony's Mavica line of digital cameras from the late 90s were compelling due to their use of normal floppy disks instead of expensive flash media. But when photo sizes became too large for floppies, the company switched to another commodity media instead...with interesting results.
Sources:
MVC-CD1000 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
MVC-CD200 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"The Future of Digicam Tech," HWM, April 2004.
"Direct-to-DVD Gets Better," PC Magazine, August 23, 2005.
Sony a100 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Sony a9 photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
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I had a CD-1000 and shot probably close to 10000 photos with it. Loved that thing to pieces. It was best to get third party discs which could be bought in bulk on a spindle. Somewhere I still have all the discs! One issue was that you couldn’t use the discs in a slot loading drive. So I had to transfer all images via a cable when I got a G4 PowerBook.
I had a floppy mavica and it was just a much better camera than the average point and shoot (which is the comparison he is making) either film or digital. Unlike the digital point and shoot cameras with higher resolution on paper, even the 640x480 pictures from the floppy camera looked far, far better than a cheap point and shoot with a 2MP low end CCD and plastic optics. Megapixels is a pretty meaningless spec.
There were actually little plastic shells that you could buy to adapt a 3inch CD to the normal size (and, some slot loading drives would just work with the small discs on their own). I used one such adapter for my PC. I'm sure I was gambling with fire using it, but it worked for me to read the discs when I needed to.
@@seligman99 I still own a cd-single of Another Brick in the Wall I bought in 1987 or 88 in a 3 inch CD format. They were already over a decade old when the slot CD ROM drives were being made. Come to think of it though, I don't think I ever tried it in any of my car CD players which were all slot loading.
I had a CD-300 Mavica and a Pioneer slot loading burner which did work with the mini CDs. Though you're right that most slot loaders did not, so my laptop at the time couldn't use them. I loved those little CDs, though, they were the perfect size.
@@bjn714 Of course one of the big things about the Nintendo Wii was that it had a slot loading drive that could take the smaller discs used by the Gamecube, slot loading drives that could take mini cd's/dvd's certainly were rare but with the Wii using them there is probably more out there than most people think.
Remember having a discussion with my mother in the time period. She wanted to buy a digital camera and wanted to use one of the Mavica models that used either magnetic or optical disc (that detail is a long lost memory now.) I convinced her that things were rapidly heading in a different direction and she bought one of their Memory Stick models instead.
Mavric was good back then, Memory Stick, CD, or Floppy is only personal. Is she still owing the machine, i don't think she needed the 1997 floppy model.
Ugh, I hate memory stick.
I absolutely loved my CD Mavica. I still have it somewhere. One interesting thing to note here, and im not sure how widely this was done but it was a fact that police investigators used these cameras for a long time. The logic here was, that you set a time and date on the camera, and took crime scene photos with those timestamps that were then instantly and permanently burned to CD. Granted the images could be altered afterwards but as long as the chain of evidence collecting was intact the images were court admissible evidence. These cameras can still hold that claim today, where any other camera save for a film camera cannot. While your camera took a dive while using I suggest that unreliability might be due to age more than design. I can't say how many disks I fed through my Sony and it was still working when I put it away for the last time. Yes, I got a Panasonic DVD camcorder afterwards. Not quite as reliable as the Sony though the only problem it suffers from is the lens cover still no longer close due to some dirt that got in there when I shot some footage from a rally race.
my mom bought one new and i still have it. when i put it away a few years ago the cd drive still worked. they took great pictures for the time and while not comparable to modern dslrs and mirrorless cameras are decent if you can find one that works and is cheap enough. it was a good way to get around the cost of memory at the time but i agree with the end point that cds were a dead end in consumer cameras. she had a couple of floppy mavikas before that but they got lost to history.
What’s to stop someone altering the time and date (by an hour, a day, a week) on the camera just before taking certain photographs? The gap on a single CD might be suspect, but load a new one in and it could be obscured.
@@kaitlyn__L there's nothing to stop someone from falsifying the time or date on that camera. That is the reason for the chain of evidence. The time and date are set and verified at the station, and are probably signed off by a supervisor. The photos are taken at the crime scene and the disk finalized before being put into a sealed evidence bag, which is then signed and verified again. Case in point, I found some old laptops in the trash. On one of them I found some child porn. I notified the sheriff. The sent a deputy and I demonstrated what I found on the laptop. I basically had to give a verbal statement of where I found them, whether or not there was a witness (there was) to clear myself (it wasn't my porn) and whether or not I had fabricated it or not (forensics would scrape the harddrive proving my innocence) and finally if I had copied any of it (again forensics). Turns out the original owner whose identity was all over it (including a resume) was a girl's volleyball coach at the local high school who had just recently quit his job and moved out of state. Huh. So yeah the deputy immediately took some of that red evidence tape and sealed the laptop shut. And away it went to... you guessed it, FORENSICS! I am very interested in police work in general and detective work. And when the business that I worked for had a breakin, and the police were taking crime scene photos with the exact same model camera that I owned... yeah I took up that conversation pretty quick.
@@kaitlyn__Lso before Mavica was a thing, they used polaroids with spectrafilm and built in time codes. That had the same issue, so the time and date are set by the individual in charge of crime scene photography, and it's recorded when they leave and when they return as being the same. Every camera is also checked twice daily - morning and evening - to be sure no tampering has occurred in the interim. While it's not perfect, it works and maintaining the chain of evidence alongside it does a lot to eliminate any worries about bad time codes, etc.
@@medes5597the spectra system is still one of the best and most comprehensive law enforcement photography kits ever. The CD mavica is up there too, but you can't beat being able to have prints for the physical, more difficult to tamper with accurately these days, files. Everyone knows how to mess with computer files now, but ask working age people how to tamper with a physical photo and they wouldn't know. Not to mention how the spectra has an entire kit for closeups and coordinated framing for absolute consistency. All the departments i know switched to some crappy early 2010s impact proof digital cameras, i don't know how they possibly manage with that nonsense. Polaroid NEEDS to make Spectra again, portraits and medical applications are also in dire need...
I remember back in 2003 a place where I worked used a floppy disk Mavica for employee ID photos and marketing photos, then they upgraded to the CD Mavica and the jump in image quality was fantastic at that time.
Floppies and CDs seemed a bit odd for sure but Sony has always been at the forefront of technologies at any given time. Interesting flashback of this odd time with media. In Sony we trust! 😅
One major mistake I think he is making is comparing point and shoot 35mm cameras with the higher end SONY cameras with CD. Most point and shoot cameras suck, whether film or digital.
and will always be the forefront
Don’t forget hi8 cassette
I am the original CD-R 🤪
I remember when these came out. Before I was a photographer, this was the first camera I really wanted.
For some reason, your voice is more nostalgic than the items being reviewed. 👏👍
I had one of these CD Mavicas! My Dad got given it by work, but I ended up using it more. I got many nice photos out of it.
People laughed when they purchased Minolta and would not purchase the Sony branded dslrs..... Took a few years before they got traction. However anyone selling cameras around that time could see what they were planning and my god it worked. Blew Pentax out of the water first, then and still gave Nikon and Canon both a run for theironey and pushed both to chase them in many markets.
Loving the latest batch of videos! Amazing tech piece selection.
You can create a museum with all of this great technology things, cameras, cellphones, gadgets, everything is incredible, I've never seen much of this things before, even this camera. Enjoying this so much
This channel IS the museum, offering much more information than any regular museum could.
We used to use a bunch of that exact model at the newspaper I worked at years ago. They worked pretty well for our use case (usually a salesperson going out to take photos of used cars or real estate, etc.). They also came with (or maybe we bought them separately) adapters you could clip to the outside of the mini-CDs if your drive didn't support them (think slot-loaders).
Love it when a new Does Not Compute vid drops
It's crazy how many of those old Sony infolithium batteries i come across still hold a charge...
I had the CD 300, I loved it! Was quite a tank of a camera.
I remember my high school teacher had the CD digital camera, it was mostly because of those iMacs that could burn play and burn CDs. And yes we had the Sony photo vault in class, but it lacked burning full size CDs, why mini CDs! Even back then mini CDs were hard to find at most stores!
I love this channel not only because I love all this classic tech, but watching these videos is like a Time Machine to my youth our very early adulthood as in this video.
Weird tech but I have that kind of a camcorder back in 2007 I think. It uses mini DVD-RW discs and was quite good compromise for that time. Thank you! :)
Mavica cameras are alway very interesting, I’ve got a CD300 alongside some of the floppy models. The main downside is just that mini CDs aren’t as common as normal CDs, but combine one with a RW disc (or even just a stack of CD-R discs) and it works well! Might not be the most practical thing to use, but even after all this time they are still very cool.
Used the floppy version at school in the late nineties and it was actually really awesome! We used it mostly for the school paper or photo and arts projects. Sure. While shooting in highest quality, you could perhaps just get a hand full of photos per disk but it wasn’t really a problem. One, or if you really needed two, ten packs of floppies is not hard to carry around in your coat pocket. Slide in a disk, take the photos and just copy the of the diskettes when you’re back at the computer. We had a smaller cannon camera that could hold more photos but since usb wasn’t really widely adopted yet we had to use the parallel port. Getting the photos of that camera took ages and, quite often, it just failed. So pretty much nobody upset that one while the school kept buying more Sony’s :)
We had a CD 1000 at work. At the time the Army's paperwork to buy a camera and to develop a roll of film was exactly the same. So this was a lot less work than getting film printed and you didn't have to scan the photos in if you wanted to use it in a report. Picture quality for the time was fine. It helped that we were using it to document things in the field rather than anything artistic.
I owned both a Mavica Disk and CD camera. While the disk camera had low resolution, mine had a large zoom lens and stabilization. The pictures I took with the thing were great for the time, especially after up scaling them a little with the batch processes of Photoshop.
Great video. I had my own experience of Sony's DVD camcorders - a DCR-DVD101E. The problem really was, the quality was poor - MPEG2 - and not particularly compatible with editing software that was really built around DV video, such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker. Before too long I bought a miniDV camcorder instead and never looked back.
I would love to see you cover Sony's two cameras for the Playstation Portable. Novel little digital cameras of surprisingly good quality that I've had one of for my own old PSP-3000.
My first digital camera was a CD Mavica model MVC-350, which I choose because my computer at the time - an already outdated Macintosh 6100 - didn’t have support for USB connection. Anyway, even though the acknowledged fragilities of the CD-R recording, it worked as a horse, and I took literally thousands and thousands of photos (and movies) with it. This Mavica is still with me - I don’t know if it still works, but someday I would give it a try…
the novel I bought in 2008 has mini CD for an OST for the book, and I still have it. I can't play or rip it now cause my only CD-ROM is super drive, but this video brings my memory back. Wonder if people confuse Mini CD with minidisc these days.
photo vault looked like a very convenient idea. If I had any stake in the game back then, I'd cherish the photo vault to "back up" photos to clear cards while on the move.
Still have one of the 500 models, and a 400. Used the 500 for some great shots of the 2017 eclipse, and pics of the Curiosity rover when it was being prepped at JPL. Even had some NASA guy stop to ask me about it, as they'd never seen a camera that used the little CDs, and found it fascinating. It was also a solid performer in extreme low-light situations with its laser focusing system, something Apple didn't "innovate" until decades later.
best content on utube. facts.
Ohh wow my family had that sony camera back then, we used it a lot and it took some fantastic images on our trips. We definitely had a lot of those mini discs to store all our images and I think we still have some blank discs around lol. I miss the old analogue feel of placing the disc inside and feeling it wirr up, but I dont miss the read wait times lol.
Ooo what’s that silver digicam on screen left at the end? Looks delish
I collected about 7 units of Mavica models with FDD. The best so far is the FD200 which has both FDD and MS. Then again, I always wanted the FD97 but very difficult to find.
Sony has always taken such amazing risks when it came to quirky designs and unique formats! You should review the Sony DVD7 camcorder, I think it was the most unique out of all of them! I know they also made AVCHD DVD camcorders as well that played in Blu ray drives!
I have 7 mavica camera's in my collection and love them all. it's true that Sony went down the wrong route with the storage media but also it allowed lots of people access to a format that they otherwise could not afford
I've got one of the original floppy disc cameras as well as a CD one. I occasionally go back to the floppy one as it creates unique images and it's a bit of a talking point. The CD one just sits in a shelf as the images it produces are like a good phone camera from around 2010 but just aren't very interesting. They're both still reliable and working and you can pick up replacement batteries for them
My brother-in-law had one of these! I remember when he bought it and broke it out one Christmas. I had to bite my tongue to not laugh at his willingness to invest in something that was, without question, doomed to be almost instantaneously obsolete. DSLR's and point and shoot cameras that took SD storage cards were already out on the market, so this was definitely a head scratcher!
It might of been on sale!
I had the 300 I think it was. All my old youtube vids from 2006 were taken from that. One feature I loved that it introduced was after you took a picture it would record 10 seconds of sound. So when you watched the photos on a projector etc it would automatically playback the audio and would set the atmosphere. It's been done since but that was the first time I saw it.
You missed the fact that all disks were more expensive than needed to be because of the music tax. Just in case you made a mixed tape the music people had to get their cut of ALL disk sales. Even though you already paid them for your albums you made the mixed tape from.
That was only for "Music CD-R". It was a special disk type that was required for the first home CD recorders; they couldn't use standard CD-R.
@@_Thrackerzod No they taxed them all.
@@Mr.Unacceptable Not in the US, normal CD-Rs had no royalties. That's why the "Music CD-R" discs were more expensive. Quote: "This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
@@_Thrackerzod Maybe that's the misunderstanding. Canada all writeable disks have a music tax. DVD blue rays CD-r everything. Stores would advertise the price without it and add it at the till doubling the price. You were only there because the disks were advertised as a deal and then to find out they were more expensive than the regular price. This lead a very distinctive memory of how the tax worked and what prices were good or advertized fake prices. Disks are still really expensive because of this music tax. I still use them for backing up my collection.
I had the same camera it was pretty cool but yeah more prone to break by using laser motor etc
Very cool I had no idea about this type of camera
I owned one of these cameras and used it for about 18 months, because the CDR's had much more capacity than Compact Flash at the time, plus it was cheaper. It worked really well for the most part, but I eventually sold it because I could see SD cards were the future, and so I ended up selling it on ebay for almost as much as I paid for it. There were at the time a staunch band of sony fans who simply wanted anything Sony sold.
Good video, thank you
You are my allways favourite sir❤
can you review the two minidisc cameras?
The floppy disks were free around the time, as you got free AOL floppy disks. That is a major reason I like it, as I got boxes of t hose disks for free.
I never had a Mavica, but yah, I remember those. I was bummed when AOL switched to CD-ROMs -- no more free blank disks. :-(
I've kinda been wondering why I haven't heard much about Minolta cameras in a while. Now I know. I wasn't super into the brand, to be honest, but I remember their "From the minds of Minolta" commercials and every now and then that phrase pops into my head.
Stll love the Floppy Mavica. So satisfying. Sony also had released a CD video camera.
With floppy mavica it was such a simple concept. 1: Take pictures 2: Put floppy into pc. The CD ones were bigger, had the whole optical media rigmarole of format, finalize, while the flash based ones were getting smaller and cheaper. I always felt tike most of the people willing to put up with the CD's were also the types that would be willing to pay for smaller, and less cumbersome flash media and cameras. Always thought it was cool though.
Nice collin 😃
Cathode ray dude did a video on camcorders that used CDs and DVDs but never seen a still camera that did. Very interesting!
I wish the photo vault used full sized CDs. The small ones were not easy to find at all.
I had one, 5mpixel with a Zeiss lens. The quality of images was incredible.
Nostalgia pura 🇧🇷
When those arrived at Best Buy we thought they were soooooo cool. The practicality of the whole media didn't cross our mind at first.
Waiting for Gordon Laing to get on this era on his Dino Bytes channel. I was aware that film cameras that used CDs and DVDs existed, never really used on, not sure if I knew that photo cd cameras also existed. As always, I loved these mini CDs, I really miss them.
I like how the standalone burner has some of the PlayStation 2's design language.
I had one in 2001! It was a pretty damn good camera
Saw one of these today for the first time at a thrift store and then I get home and there's a video in my subscriptions about them lol
I had one of these! It got misplaced during a move though. Wish I still had it.
Which reminds me... Sony could have used cartridges for the PSP but flash storage was ludicrously expensive by the byte (especially as games could be as large as 1.8GB) so they had to settle for a catankerous yet inexpensive optical media. Of course, homebrewers and pirates knew better especially when the price of flash media went down over time.
A vertiable snap shot of camera technology and picture media. How meta.
I have a Sony DVD camera from a little later that still works great! Have a bunch of RW discs for it. It's really just a curiosity though. Not practical for anything being SD. Got it at a yard sale super cheap.
I remember getting a DVD video camcorder and the number of videos I shot jumped higher dramatically. Before that, camcorders used tapes, and even though mine was digital, you still had to transfer it to the computer in real time, then wait for it to be encoded to a DVD compatible file, then you had to burn it to a disc. A product that takes a lot of steps to get results isn't one you aren't going to use very often.😮
I loved mini-CDs in the early 2000's, I had an MP3 CD player that I liked to use while riding my bike to school. Regular CDs would get jostled too much in my baggy cargo pants (this was 2003 as an awkward teenager after all). MP3 CDs would be better, but still could skip, but MP3 on mini-CDs was perfect, since the smaller shape made them spin more stably (less angular momentum). I don't know if anyone ever made one, but I imagined a smaller form factor MP3-CD player that only played miniCDs
Remember having mini-dvd camcorder. Around 2007 I think. It was SONY but I can’t recall the model.
Floppy is cute. It's so bulky but I miss it.
A bit off topic: A friend of mine backs up a lot of data regularly. He was backing it up on cheap Bluray BD-R media. Then he did a price comparison for the difference between multiple terrabyte hard drives and blank BD-R discs. The hard drives are now cheaper per gigabyte (not the horrible SMR disk drives) than blank BD-R discs! It boggles the mind how something with so much technology as a hard disk drive can be cheaper per gigabyte than some plastic discs sandwiched around some metallic foil layers.
I can only assume they never managed to get Minidisc to work right or they'd have used that. Mind you, that never took off in the US like it did in Japan and Europe.
Yeah, there must have been a reason for that... the capacity wasn't too far off from a mini CD, and Sony already had the manufacturing for the drives sorted out. Only down side is that you couldn't put one in a computer, but a cable would have fixed that. Would have been cool to see.
Sony MZ-DH10P
My dad had a CD Mavica for taking pictures as part of of his job managing Power Plants taking pictures during inspections his first digital camera was internal flash with PC card memory. He never used the floppy version likely because he was working around massive magnets and the 1.44 mb floppy is not that durable.
Back in the day I loved these kind cameras since it was easy to use rewritable cds and dvds for data then.
I have a Sony Mavica MVC-CD500, but like yours, the laser's dead so it can read or finalize Mini CDs. I also have a Sony Mavica MVC-CD350 that I got at Goodwill for $10.50 USD that works fine and it's able to read and finalize Mini CDs.
Fitting that don't also developed the 3.5"FDD and ½ of the CD format
Can this be in solid stainless steel? Almost seamless like a piece of drift wood
I think I have the same 35mm nikon at 1:40 and had the same HP (altho a P3) growing up at 2:48 lol
I've just got one of these and have the same disc error. However, I've noticed something. The sticker on the camera says to use 156mb CDRs. The ones I have are 200mb and I notice the ones in your video are 200mb and 210mb. Is it possible the camera only works with 156mb discs? A seller on eBay here in the UK has new old stock Sony 'For Mavica' 156mb CDRs and CDRWs so I have ordered 1 of each to test this theory.
Sadly when they arrived I still got the same drive error. I guess the laser on mine is gone too and we'll never know if the disc capacity matters.
156 MB are the Best for mavica, it has problem with higher capacities and cdr dye Color (formulation). I will upload my own opinion on mavicas on Thursady 22 June 2023.
I didn't know this existed
Remember a floppy based mavica or two in the school art dept in the late 90s - had sense - kids could easily lose a still relatively expensive flash card and only needed to take a few pics at a time. Loss of a floppy not an issue
I have this
I wonder if there were any Mini Disc cameras, I think that format could've been good for digital cameras
Gotta appreciate Sonys willingness to try different things. At least until they could figure out their own proprietary storage mediums. Surprised there wasn't a minidisc camera
My father-in-law has a CD-1000. He used it up until the mid 2010s when we finally bought him a Canon DSLR.
I have used one of these
I remember paying AUD$800 for a 1GB MemoryStick Duo Pro at a similar time. And I was HAPPY cos I got it for a steal! Wow times have changed.
Oh man, my parents recorded all of my 2000’s memories on this!
I finally got 1 last year. Always wanted since I was a teen.
Imagine what could have been....first the FD Mavica...then the CD Mavica...and finally...the SD Mavica?
These can only take pictures, no video?
Kinda surprised they didn't go with mini disk but I guess in a way this is more convenient
5mpx isn't close to the limit of decent analog film, but is very much on par to what most consumers with a compact film camera would get due to limitations of lenses, focus, vibrations, etc.
I have a Mavica MVC-FD5 and FD Mavica MVC-FD200
I would actually love to own one
'The laser died' ah yes, the legendary Sony timer
the camera in the intro i do have
Floppies solved also another problem: how to transfer the images to your PC. This was before USB.
I do not get the outdate-argument. I bought a 3 megapixel camera in 2005 and used as my primary one up to 2007 and as a secondary until 2010. Unless you are a professional and the customers would choose a competitor with better equipment cameras do not get outdated. Digital cameras reached 49% share in sales in 2002 and 73% in 2003. 2005 it was over 90%.
What! Sony bought Minolta? Thanks for the info 😵 i thought Minolta went the Kodak way not believing in digital then being merged with konica for brand recognition
"practically zero ongoing cost" of digital photography... my friend, my wallet would like a word with you!
A 1GB compact flash card would cost around $2604.74 in the year 2000! Yikes!
Amazon still sells batteries for mavicas