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I occasionally write long posts but you should assume I'm talking out of my ass until proved otherwise. I do like writing shit sometimes.  

 

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renne
@renne

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Prologue - A Format is Born <-- YOU ARE HERE
Chapter 0.1 - Trouble in Paradise

It's Mavica time, mother fucker. What's that? You say you have a Mavica too? You put your silly little 3.5 inch floppy disks in there? Shove it up your ugly ass. That's right. Shove it up your ugly ass. My Mavica is different. I could beat you to death with my Mavica. You have a Digital Mavica. I have a ProMavica. My Mavica was covering wars while yours was still in the womb. It's still video season 'round these parts. What the fuck is a JPEG???

Sorry, I've calmed down now. This is an emotional moment for me. I finally have a working video floppy SLR. I've been searching for so long. I've gone through disappointment, heartbreak, poor financial decisions. But it's finally here. And it sucks ass. I wouldn't have it any other way.

This post covers the introduction of still video cameras. I'll dive into the MVC-5000 itself in a later post. Yes, I'm absolutely getting carried away.

Let's talk about the origins of the Mavica and video floppy. The year is 1981. After several experiments in the 70s proving CCD's can be used to capture images without the use of film or any other chemical processing, Sony has gone all in on manufacturing them. Tape storage media for video and audio were well established, but photographs were lacking their own storage medium. Worry not, said Sony. We fucking love specifying formats. The video floppy was born. Sony called theirs the Mavipak:
Sony Mavipak video floppy disk. Image credit digicamhistory.com

It's important to understand that unlike traditional floppy disks, video floppies stored analog data. The video floppy is like a hybrid between the standard floppy disk and the video tape. A spinning magnetic disk captures individual frames of analog video that could then be recreated on a television screen using a playback device. The "video" in video floppy is a slight misnomer; the disks were never designed to store motion video. They use existing video technology to store still images, hence the resulting capture devices being named "still video cameras." By the way, being based on existing video standards means separate devices had to be manufactured for NTSC and PAL televisions. 50 hertz strikes again! The floppies can store 50 frames of interlaced images, or 25 frames of progressive images. These are referred to as "field" (a single interlaced field) and "frame" (a full frame of two interlaced fields combined) modes respectively.

The best layman's explanation of how a video floppy works that I've found comes from the manual for the MVC-5000:
A screenshot of the MVC-5000 manual explaining video floppies. A diagram shows the 50 tracks of the disk on which individual images can be stored

With CCD production in full swing and a new format defined, Sony unveiled the first Mavica prototype to the world with a shocking announcement: WITHOUT FILM, PICTURES???? This article from the November 1981 edition of DESIGN sums up the current climate and understanding of the underlying technology:

Of course, Sony being Sony, they completely jumped the gun with this announcement. CCDs were still stupidly expensive in 1981, and years passed without Sony releasing a still video camera to the public. I found this dramatic New York Times article from 1984 chastising their early announcement. As the article mentions, Canon was starting to make their own strides in still video cameras, testing their new system at the 1984 Olympics. That camera, the RC-701, would come out in 1985, beating Sony to the market by two years.
The Canon RC-701

It wasn't until 1987, six full years since the announcement, that Sony would finally release the Mavica A7AF. Based on a Popular Mechanics article, it seems it didn't come to the US until the year after and went for Four Thousand Dollars.
The A7AF in its chonky glory

Considering how cheap 35mm film cameras had become by 1987, still video cameras that took low resolution photos artifacted to hell and back sound more like a rich person's novelty than a serious tool for photography. Remember, though: these are the first widely available way of taking photographs that were immediately viewable. There was no development time, and better yet, no shipping time. For the first time, the media could take a picture across the world, transmit it over phone lines, and have it in the next day's morning edition.

Of course, the 90s introduced cheap digital storage and image compression, which would quickly make video floppies and still video cameras obsolete. But before that could happen, Sony engineered one of the most absurd cameras I've ever laid my eyes on: The ProMavica MVC-5000. Join me next week for the first part of a deep dive into this six pound monster that takes some of the shittiest imaginable photographs!

In the meantime, let me know if I made any mistakes in my post. My eyes feel like they're about to explode from strain researching this stuff, but I could have easily overlooked something important. I didn't proofread this either, because I am an idiot. You can also check out my earlier writeup on using a video floppy recorder to screenshot video games:


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