Sanyo IDC-1000Z (2000)

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The Sanyo IDC-1000Z was the only digital camera in the world especially built for the ID Photo Disk. It's idea was conceived in 1999 and was first shown on tech fairs in 2000 and announced the same year on 2000-10-02. The ID Photo Disk was a novelty and could store up to 730MB of data. Although the ID Photo Disk was developed jointly with Olympus and Hitachi Maxell, none of the other brands wanted to produce a product for it and so Sanyo got stuck with it. Sanyo later also marketed IDStorage, a storage device (IDS-M1) where the user could copy his memory cards to an ID Photo Disk. The storage device was designed by Kinemura Hiroyuki and it won a Good Design Award in 2001.

 

The IDC-1000Z was not extremely large but resembled somewhat the Olympus C-2100 Zoom or Canon PowerShot Pro90 IS. The camera's viewfinder was a TTL-video viewfinder consisting of an LCD cyber-display. One of it's many featured was the built-in neutral-density filter that could simply be activated in the menu, something no other digital camera at the time had. It was possible to record audio along with the images and as a bonus one could even record a sound and save it as the shutter sound! Video editing, white balance, 3x optical zoom, firewire connectivity, video recording and much much more. One Photo Disk could literally record up to two hours of moving images and roughly 11,000 images in VGA quality. Much more than any recording media of that time could store.

 

It was also the first digital camera in the world with both USB and Firewire connectivity and to adopt Sanyo's newly developed real-time imaging processor with 8.5 million transistors. For this Sanyo was awarded the Design Achievement Silver Award from the EDA consortium. The IDC-1000Z remained a one time experiment and no other cameras like this were ever developed. Initial production volume was set at 10,000 units per month. Together with the camera Sanyo marketed an extremely rare memory card transfer station called IDS-M1. You can see it in the pictures above. This Photo Disk transfer station was able to copy the content of ID Photo Disks to a variety of other memory cards and vice versa. It is unknown how many of the camera and how many of the copy stations were actually sold but to be honest, I have only seen one complete unit so far.