Konica KC-400 (1987)
The Konica KC-400 is an oddity, and a frustrating one for the archival record. It is documented as an early digital camera from 1987. That year several manufacturers tried still-video/digital, and Fujifilm's ES-1 and Sony's MVC-A7AF arrived alongside it. Past that basic identity, the documentation thins out almost immediately.
What the record does show is that the KC-400 looked striking. The digitalkameramuseum.de calls the design "spectacular," and notes the body was blue. That was an unusual color choice for the era, when black and silver dominated camera design. Images were saved to 2-inch floppy disks, the same still-video media format used by several competing models of the period.
Konica planned a small ecosystem around the camera. A tabletop recorder, the KR-400, was offered at an additional $2,000, alongside a large video printer called the VP-1000. That $2,000 figure is for the recorder, not the camera itself. The KC-400's own original price is not documented.
Beyond those few facts, the record is essentially silent. No sensor resolution, no lens specifications, no dimensions or weight, no battery type, no production run details, no period reviews, and no contemporary reception notes have survived in the sources available to us. It appears to have been a brief, ambitious experiment from Konica rather than a mainstream product line.
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