Sony PC Card Camera (1996)

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Video and still pictures on notebooks have always been difficult in the mid 1990s. Too expensive, excessive CPU consumption have caused notebooks to stand in the shadows of more powerful desktop solution. Today, notebooks have integrated webcams but 20 years ago it was a pretty difficult task. Sony, Sigma, Toshiba and other vendors agreed on a new PC card based standard called Zoomed Video. It's goal was to transfer video and images from a PC card to audio and video systems. Toshiba was the first company to incorporate the ZV Port technology across their entire notebook line. The ZV Port allowed for transmission of images with 640x480 pixel resolution at a speed of 30 frames per second.

Sony however was the first to introduce a digital camera for the new ZV Port. The camera consisted of a camera head tethered to a ZV Port card that could be inserted in the PC card slot. This technology eliminated the need of sending large amounts of video and audio data through the CPU and internal PCI bus. Sony's PC Card camera however, remained a design and was never marketed.