Bought these last week because I ended up with a bit more disposable cash than I expected, and I'm still on this CD Mavica kick. These 5 discs cost me $35. That's $7 per disc, an abysmal value... but it's still better than most listings on eBay. There are seriously people selling sealed 3-packs for $50 right now... or at least trying to.
The main reason for this is that CD Mavica cameras will complain if you use anything but Sony-blessed media. This is par for the course for Sony of the era, and projects an image - however unfounded - of unreliability with other media. And you want your precious family photos to actually be saved, don't you?! So, even though these have been out of production for a good while, and you can find mini-CDs from any other vendor for far cheaper, these are still in pretty high demand from people who want no-fuss operation from these cams, and those generous people on eBay know it. Sony certainly achieved their goal. I mean, hell, I bought them, didn't I?
There are some interesting traits to these discs though. One that you might not notice immediately is that nowhere do they state how many minutes of red-book CD Audio you can store on them. Because Sony intends them to only be used in Mavica cameras, they don't bother including it. But it's pretty odd, given that every other CD I've ever seen has included that information, even ones that definitely weren't designed with CD Audio in mind. Now, I've seen discs that only state the minutes and won't state the megabytes - early recordable discs made exclusively for digital recording - but I've never seen it done the other way around. Doing the math, it seems at 156MB you'd be able to squeeze about 17 minutes of audio onto a disc, maybe half a minute more.
And then there is that capacity. 156MB. That's an odd number, mainly because, as far as I've been able to tell, Sony was the only one to make discs in this capacity. Every other manufacturer made discs in 185MB or 210MB (analogous, I believe, to 12cm discs' 650MB and 700MB, respectively). Why are these discs smaller than every other on the market? Was it some limitation of the Mavica hardware? Perhaps the initial CD1000 model was forced into this odd capacity, and even as later cameras could use full capacity discs, Sony kept producing them in the smaller size to maintain compatibility. But that seems unlikely. I don't have a CD1000 on hand to test, but I suspect it would burn to the full surface of a 185MB CD-R just fine (I've heard it doesn't support CD-RWs as none were on the market at the time of release, which is the main reason I don't have one on hand...).
Or perhaps it was one of the methods - or even the only method - Sony used to tell if you were using their discs or someone else's. But gimping your own product just for a "Sony recommends Mavica discs" message seems too extreme even for Sony - surely they knew what a bad value their discs would look like on a shelf next to their competitors with universally 29-54MB more than their own. But maybe they weighed that risk, and figured the illusion of incompatibility from that little prompt would make up for the potential loss.
Or some third reason I haven't considered.
Anyways, maybe the CD Mavica will be happier using these discs. I dunno. I'll test them soon.