Floppy Disk Variants - 2-inch Floppy Disks

2-inch Floppy Disks

At least two mutually-incompatible floppy disks measuring two inches appeared in the 1980s.

One of these, officially referred to as a Video Floppy (or VF for short) was used to store video information for still video cameras such as the original Sony Mavica (not to be confused with later Digital Mavica models) and the Ion and Xapshot cameras from Canon. VF was not a digital data format; each track on the disk stored one video field in the analog interlaced composite video format in either the North American NTSC or European PAL standard. This yielded a capacity of 25 images per disk in frame mode and 50 in field mode.

Another one, the LT-1, was digitally formatted - 720 kB, 245TPI, 80 tracks/side, double-sided, double-density. They were used exclusively in the Zenith Minisport laptop computer circa 1989. Although the media exhibited nearly identical performance to the 3½-inch disks of the time, they were not successful. This was due in part to the scarcity of other devices using this drive making it impractical for software transfer, and high media cost which was much more than 3½-inch and 5¼-inch disks of the time.