The 2-inch floppy disk, or Video Floppy, was first shown by Sony in 1981 with prototypes of its first still video camera, the Mavica (Magnetic Video Camera). The Mavica was not a digital camera as such, but an analogue video camera capable of writing c
Each image was recorded in its own circle on the disk that was called the Mavipak by Sony. Each disk had a capacity of up to 50 images in field mode, and could be played back on a video monitor or television set (there was no built-in display). The Mav
The first camera to be commercially marketed that used the Video Floppy format was the Canon RC-701 of 1986, and this was followed by other still video cameras (manufactured by companies such as Minolta, Panasonic, Casio, Konica and Canon as well as S
A Video Floppy disk drive and digitiser (the FV-540) was released by Canon in 1988, and this allowed the disks to be read and the analogue information converted to digital formats so images could be manipulated. It was an external drive that connected
A higher-resolution version of the Video Floppy (called HiVF) was developed in the late 1980s.
Still video cameras like the Sony Mavica line continued to use Video Floppies and HiVF disks until around the early 1990s, before being superseded by true digital still cameras. In 1997 Sony began using floppy disks in its Mavica cameras again, but thi
An incompatible version of the 2-inch floppy disk (called LT-1) could be formatted for 720 KB of data, and in this form was used in the Zenith Minisport laptop computer circa 1989.
Dimensions: 60 mm x 54.1 mm x 3.5 mm