Mavica Vs. Mate 20 Pro: 20 Year Old Digital Camera Compared To Current Top Smartphone

How good were digital cameras 20 years ago? And above all, how do they compare to today's smartphone cameras? We made the comparison in Barcelona. In our (somewhat unfair) comparison, the Sony Mavica MVC-FD81 released in October 1998 competes against the Huawei Mate 20 Pro released in late summer 2018. Even though various 2019 flagship smartphones have already been released, the Mate 20 Pro still belongs to the crème de la crème of mobile phone photography.

The Mavica shoots images with a maximum resolution of 1,024 × 768 pixels and has an optical triple zoom. Smaller videos can also be recorded. Five seconds with a resolution of up to 320 x 240 are possible, but only with a jerky 9 frames per second. However, all photos and videos were not stored on internal memory or compact flash cards, instead, modern 3.5-inch floppy disks were used. With them it was possible to access the photos pretty easily with any PC, after all everybody had installed a corresponding drive back then.

However, the disadvantage of this storage method should be clear: Constantly handling floppy disks is part of everyday life at Mavica; in the highest resolution, just seven photos fit on one of the disks with 1.44 MB storage capacity. In addition, floppy disks are not exactly robust. If you don't take good care of your storage media, you can easily lose data.

The opponent of the Mavica is the Mate 20 Pro from Huawei. Six months after the market launch, it is still one of the frontrunners in DxOMark - a worthy representative of current smartphone camera technology.

It should be clear from the start that there will be significant advances in photography after 20 years. You can find out how big these differences are in our comparison video.

In our camera test, you can find out how the camera of the Huawei Mate 20 Pro performs independently of the Mavica: