Disc Pics: The Sony Mavica MVC-CD300

At the dawn of the digital era there was still uncertainty as to which storage media would dominate. Compact Flash took an early head start, but the storage wars raged for a few years there.

Sony actually had a successful line of early digital cameras that recorded photos and video on 1.44MB 3.5" floppy discs. Thing is, those floppy discs that could hold a reasonable number of 640x480 shots started looking pretty insufficient as sensor resolutions raced past the megapixel mark around the turn of the millennium.

Sony briefly experimented with cameras that used 8cm CD-R discs, beginning with the Mavica MVC-CD1000 which they announced in the summer of 2000. The CD1000 sported a two megapixel sensor which meant you could get better than seventy JPEG images on a 156MB CD-R, as opposed to the three 1.3MP images my Mavica FD88 can squeeze onto a floppy.

At the time, the big advantage that Sony's floppy disc and CD-R Mavicas offered was the ability to transfer photos to nearly any computer via sneakernet. With other digital cameras of the era, you either had to have a card reader, which were far from ubiquitous, or you had to laboriously cable the camera to the computer via USB. On the other hand, almost every desktop and laptop of the time had a floppy drive, a CD-ROM, or both.

Above is the Mavica CD300, a 3MP camera from early 2001, representing the second generation of Sony's CD-R cameras. As you can see, within a single year, the resolution of cameras had jumped by 50%, from the 2MP CD1000 to the 3MP CD300.

The handwriting was on the wall for disc cams almost from their launch. The last generation of CD-R Mavicas came out in February of 2003, by which time the 5MP CD500 was down to fifty JPEGs per disc and, unlike the constantly growing capacities of Compact Flash and SD cards, CD-R capacity was fixed. The disc era only lasted six years, from 1997 to 2003.

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