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Mavica FD5, the first digital model.

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. Images were recorded onto a mini-cd. and then put into a video reader that was connected to a television monitor or color printer. However, the early Mavica cannot be considered a true digital camera even though it started the digital camera revolution. It was a video camera that took video freeze-frames. The brand is most associated with digital cameras that record on floppy disks, but the name was first used for a line of analog still video cameras announced in 1981, and there were later digital models that recorded onto CDs.

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.

• MVC-FD5 (late 1997, early 1998, fixed focal length lens)
• MVC-FD7 (late 1997, early 1998, 10× optical zoom lens)
• MVC-FD75 10× optical zoom lens
• MVC-FD73
• MVC-FD71 (mid 1998, 10× optical zoom lens)
• MVC-FD51 (mid 1998, fixed focal length lens)
• MVC-FD87
• MVC-FD92
• MVC-FD83
• MVC-FD81
• MVC-FD85
• MVC-FD90
• MVC-FD91 (14× optical zoom)
• MVC-FD88
• MVC-FD95
• MVC-FD97 (10× optical zoom, 4× speed diskette and Memory Stick slot, similar to MVC-CD1000)
• MVC-FD100 (Floppy and Memory Stick)
• MVC-FD200 (same as above but 2MP)

• MVC-CD200
• MVC-CD250
• MVC-CD300
• MVC-CD350
• MVC-CD400 (First camera to use laser-assisted low-light focus)
• MVC-CD500
• MVC-CD1000 (same as MVC-FD97, except a CD-R drive instead of diskette and memory stick.)

There were other digital cameras that used disk storage as memory media.

• Panasonic PV-SD4090 a Panasonic digital camera that used SuperDisk (LS120).
• Iomega Zipcam a prototype digital camera shown at Comdex 1999 that used 100 MB Zip disks
• Agfa ePhoto CL30 Clik! Used Iomega's Clik! (later PocketZip) disk technology

• Microdrive
• List of digital camera brands
• Digital camera memory media