Mavica was a brand of Sony cameras which used removable disks as the main recording media. In August, 1981,
Sony released the Sony Mavica electronic still camera, the camera which was the first commercial electronic camera. The first Digital Mavicas recorded onto floppy disks, a feature that made them very popular in the North-American market. With the evolution of consumer digital camera resolution (megapixels), the advent of the USB interface and the rise of high-capacity storage media, Mavicas started to offer other alternatives for recording images: the floppy-disk (FD) Mavicas began to be Memory Stick compatible (initially through a Memory Stick Floppy Disk adapter, but ultimately through a dedicated Memory Stick slot), and a new CD Mavica series — which uses 8 cm CD-R/CD-RW media — was released in 2000.
The first CD Mavica (MVC-CD1000), notable also for its 10× optical zoom, could only write to CD-R discs, but it was able to use its USB interface to read images from CDs not completely written (CDs with incomplete sessions). Subsequent models are more compact, with a reduced optical zoom, and are able to write to CD-RW discs.
The Mavica line has been discontinued. Sony continues to produce point-and-shoot digital cameras in the Cyber-shot series, which uses Memory Stick technology for storage.
