Sunday Read: Histories - Sony

Sunday Reads

Alex Parker 
4th December 2022

 

Sony is a prolific powerhouse in our industry, with a market share 2nd only to Canon at time of writing, however it’s easy to forget how comparatively recently this happened. Sony’s meteoric rise to becoming one of the world’s most successful camera manufacturers took a slightly different path to many. Cameras weren’t even a consideration until decades after the company’s inception – and they didn’t create their first prototype until the early 80s. 

Now begins the story of an industry juggernaut that likes to do things differently. 

 

From humble beginnings 

Founded in 1946 by Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, or Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, began inauspiciously with floorspace in a bomb-damaged department store in Tokyo. Unable to shorten the name to TTK due to said acronym already being used by Tokyo’s rail network, the company traded as ‘Totsuko’ for a while, before realising it was tricky for Americans to say. 

 

 

What’s in a name?

Sony is a combo of two words, the Latin word ‘sonus’ referring to sound, and ‘sonny’, a slang term for a young boy. In Japan, sonny came to mean smart, well-kept young gentlemen, which Morita and Ibuka felt they were, and Sony was born. There was great resistance to this name at the time, especially from the corporation’s own bank – it just wasn’t the done thing in Japan to have your brand written in Roman letters, plus an electronics company would always be called Electronics Corporation or Technology Industries etc. Perhaps as a forward-thinking signal of things to come, Morita was adamant that the name shouldn’t be tied to an individual industry and won the battle to keep it just ‘Sony’. 

 

Early successes 

Prior to the name change, Sony created the ‘Type G’, Japan’s first ever tape recorder, however the corporation’s first major success was in the portable transistor market. In the USA, the radio industry was absolutely booming, and by the end of the 1960s units were being sold in their millions. 

Type G Tape Recorder

During the next several decades, Sony turned its hand to everything from life insurance to record players, from movies to music, from video games to robots. The diversity of its operation helped the corporation ride out multiple recessions and create a world-renowned business empire with a net global income well north of £6 billion a year as of 2022. 

 

The Good Stuff 

Sony's first foray into cameras in 1981 was video based. The initial offering was the HVC-F1, a tube camera with a fixed F1.4 lens and 6x optical zoom. With no internal recording capabilities of its own, the camera needed to be plugged into a separate video recorder via a cable, making it a little less compact than today’s camcorders. It's no great surprise that this concept died the very moment Sony released a video camera capable of recording internally – something it did 2 years later with the BMC-100 - designed to record to Betamax video tapes... 

 

Sony BMC-100

Short and sweet vs cheap and cheerful 

Sony's Betamax tape format falling to JVC’s VHS system is ancient history at this point, but it’s worth noting that in the great videotape format war of the 70s, Betamax offered a significantly higher resolution image. There were two main reasons why VHS won out. 

Most importantly, at launch Betamax only had a recording capacity of 1hr, which meant the video tapes couldn’t hold a full movie. It remains a baffling decision with hindsight not to hold off launching the product until capacity was larger. Sony did eventually realise what they’d done and released long play versions, but it was already far too late for the poor Betamax – VHS was established, and VCRs were in everybody’s homes. 

Betamax’s higher resolution image meant tapes were also more expensive to manufacture, as were the recorders and players designed to play them. JVC shrewdly targeted this with ad campaigns focussing on tape length and affordability, as well as extremely competitive pricing.  

1970s TV Guide Ad

Sony has an almost commendable history of struggling to know where to stop when innovating vs cost to the consumer. Years later, it made this near-identical mistake in the games industry when launching the feature-rich and eye-wateringly expensive Playstation 3, with rival Microsoft capitalising and building a huge lead with the cheaper Xbox 360. On this occasion though, Sony did catch and pass its adversary by the end of that console generation, selling 87m units to Microsoft’s 84m.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying the BMC-100 utilising Betamax technology wasn’t especially successful, and in 1985 Sony launched their third video camera with a third different recording format in as many years. The Sony CCD-V8 was the first video camera to record to standard 8mm videotape. This standardisation was the missing piece of Sony’s puzzle previously, and finally allowed them to get a foothold in the industry. 

 

Still game 

Original Mavica Prototype

Sony’s first camera prototype was the Mavica in 1981. This unit used proprietary floppy disks for storage and saved each individual image via a CCD (Charge Coupled Device, a circuit board imaging system) as a frame of video. This meant that technically, this was a video camera even though it only took stills. Before any iteration of the technology was available to consumers, Sony got the Mavica in the hands of pros at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, then in 1988 the Mavica MVC-C1 was finally officially launched to the public. 

 

Fast forward to 1996, and Sony released the first ever Cyber-shot with the DSC-F1. Building on the systems in place from the original Mavica, this was Sony’s first stills camera to have an LCD screen. It was followed a year later by even more crucial innovation – the Sony MVC-FD5 and FD7 shot to 3.5-inch floppy disks native to all computers at the time and saved files digitally in jpeg format to avoid any need for conversion. This ease of workflow made both bodies best-sellers worldwide, putting Sony firmly on the consumer camera map. By 1998, floppy disks were on the way out and Sony began using memory sticks instead. 

 

Get the chequebook out 

At first glance, Sony’s move into the world of professional DSLRs seemed an odd one – up until that point it had been using CCD technology rather than equipping its cameras with mirrors and viewfinders – digital was its big differentiator. However, if Sony was going to break into the world of professional photography rather than just selling to hobbyists and parents via the Argos catalogue, something needed to change. Pros cared about image quality above all else, and CCD tech at the time just couldn’t live with the top-of-the-line DSLR. 

The change came in 2005, when Sony purchased the SLR wing of Konica Minolta. With this major acquisition, Sony had all the building blocks to immediately hit the ground running in the pro photography market, and began its assault on the camera industry with the Sony A900 in 2008. In purchasing a reputable brand, professionals knew what they were getting, and placed a level of trust in Sony that they were unlikely to have otherwise. 

Sony A900 

World in motion 

Sony’s innovation continued in the video camera market, with a series of consumer camcorders building on the 8mm tape system, before transitioning to the digital tape format DV and even producing handheld units that recorded straight to DVD. In the late 90s, Sony produced cameras like the HDW-700, production level 1080i offerings for filmmakers to dabble with long before HD TVs arrived on the market. 

The early 2000s saw Hollywood finally embrace digital cameras properly, with Sony’s CineAlta F900 becoming the first A-cam to be used for major motion pictures – namely Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Once Upon A Time in Mexico. There’s no coincidence here though – Robert Rodriguez was introduced to the camera by George Lucas whilst he was editing audio for Spy Kids in 2001 at Skywalker Ranch. 

Sony’s first consumer HD camcorder arrived in the form of the HDR-HC1 in 2005. Providing a huge image upgrade with its newly created CMOS sensor, Sony would abandon tapes in favour of internal storage only 3 years later, with production cameras joining the hard drive party a year or so after that. 

In the coming years, Sony would release an 8K offering in the F65, the 4K Super-35mm F55 with its Exmor sensor, and the hugely popular FS7 in 2014. Sony’s flagship Venice range launched in 2018 and is used extensively in Hollywood, acting as primary camera on blockbuster movies like Top Gun Maverick to Downton Abbey. 

 

Tom Cruise on the set of Top Gun: Maverick

No more mirrors anymore 

Researching a piece like this, you can’t help but notice the sheer number of times Sony has been the innovator, the ‘first’ this, the ‘first’ that. The company has been at its best when pushing the envelope – even if this has sometimes led to prices that are difficult to swallow. In a crowded, stagnant DSLR market, something had to change for the company to really thrive.

 Sony's original a7

In 2013, following several years selling DSLRs, Sony decided it was time to make a statement, announcing the Sony a7 and a7R. Years earlier, Sony released several cameras with a translucent mirror that didn’t need to move out of the sensor’s path when taking a shot, but true mirrorless technology was a first for them. Within a couple of years, Sony had abandoned DSLRs altogether.

Someone had to be the ‘first’ to make this bold step, but it isn’t surprising that it was Sony who did. 

Sigma's Art line

Similarly impactful, Sony’s decision to standardise its mount system across all interchangeable cameras, stills, hybrid and cine, was a huge deal and is the reason there are so many options today. Equally significant, Sony has never tried to prevent third-party manufacturers from engineering lenses for its cameras. As such, there is an overwhelming choice of glass, as well as Sony’s own exceptional offerings – namely the ones with that lovely G on them. 

Sony FE 50mm F1.2 GM

Now and next 

These days Sony has a wide range of options for all comers. Hybrid shooters have the mainline a7, high detail photographers can leverage the power of the a7R, and video shooters have the a7S. Cinematographers have the likes of Sony’s Venice and FX ranges to play with, and for everyone else there are compacts like the RX100, vlogging cameras like the ZV range and fixed-lens camcorders too. 

The future of Sony's camera wing looks extremely bright, in stark contrast with comments made in the New York Times in 1983 when they entered the photography market, stating the company’s “best days are behind it”. Whether you shoot Sony, Canon, Nikon or Fujifilm, the corporation’s continued success is a victory for forward thinking, bold design and innovation above all else. 

For Hireacamera's full selection of Sony products and accessories, just head here:

https://www.hireacamera.com/sony-camera-lens-hire/

 

 

Sony Mavica MVC-FD81 image via of Felix Winkelnkemper at the following wikimedia link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sony_Digital_Mavica_MVC-FD81.jpg

Shopping Centre image via https://www.oldtokyo.com/

Sony Betamovie image via David162se at the following wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sony_Betamovie_BMC-100P_(retouched_filtered).jpg

JVC ad via Vintage Australian Print Ads

Mavica 1981 image via Morio at the following link:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sony_Mavica_1981_prototype_CP%2B_2011.jpg

A900 image via photo-john at the following link:
http://www.photographyreview.com/reviews/sony-alpha-a900-dslr-at-pma