The Sony MVC-CD250 writes to miniature CD media.
Sony's Mavica camera line debuted in the early 1980s, featuring analog image sensors that recorded onto proprietary floppy disks. Later Mavicas transitioned to digital technology and conventional HD DOS floppies, followed by models that wrote to CD-R and CD-RW media, including the 2-megapixel MVC-CD250, introduced in 2002. It's easier to recover images from your Mavica's discs if you understand how the camera saves its files and manages the pictures you take.
File Storage
The Mavica's disc drive stores its files on rewritable 3-inch CD-RW media. Sony sold Mavica-branded media for the camera, but you can use regular off-the-shelf miniature discs if they're of high quality. You'll see an error message on the camera's LCD screen when you insert a regular CD-RW disc, but you should have no trouble formatting it so the camera can write to it. Until you format it, however, you won't be able to save pictures to it.
Special Considerations
Before you insert a miniature CD-RW into a computer's optical drive, verify that it reads these smaller discs successfully. You're likeliest to succeed with tray-loading drives that include clasps to hold discs in place while the mechanism operates vertically instead of horizontally. These drives retain the center hole of the disc in the correct position. Never insert a miniature CD into a slot-loading optical drive such as you'll find on most notebook computers. You'll have to disassemble the computer and the drive to remove the disc.
Disc Readability
When you read CD-RW media in a computer's internal optical drive, the disc returns a much weaker signal to the drive mechanism than it receives from commercially produced discs or CD-Rs. As a result, not all optical drives fare equally well in attempting to read the media you've burned in your Sony Mavica. Try the internal or external optical drives on other systems, and transfer your image files to a flash drive or another storage medium so you're assured of retaining access to them.
Unfinalized Disc
When you've finished using a CD-RW in your MVC-CD250, you use the "Finalize" command in the camera's Set Up menu so you can read the disc in the optical drive on your computer. This command closes out the data session to which you've written image files. The camera also offers an "Unfinalize" command that enables you to continue writing images to a disc you previously finalized, providing the disc contains enough space for new photographs. If you're having trouble reading a CD-RW from your Mavica, insert it in the camera and finalize it.
Deleted Images
Unlike today's digital cameras that use SD cards and other miniature storage media, your Mavica's optical drive stores and deletes images sequentially. As a result, you can't actually remove any image except the last one on the disc, then the one before it, and so on, until you reach a file you want to remove. The camera allows you to delete other images out of sequence, but these files actually remain on the CD-RW disc, although they're removed from the disc directory. You may be able to use file-recovery software to regain access to deleted files.
Tags: optical drive, CD-RW media, your Mavica, CD-RW disc, drive stores, from your, from your Mavica