D-V500

The D-V500 took the Discman platform into portable Video CD playback, keeping the familiar round form while adding video output and the decoding hardware needed for moving images. It still looked and behaved enough like a portable optical player to sit beside the audio line, but its purpose had already started to drift into a different kind of media use.

This only really made sense during the short period when optical formats still seemed capable of branching outward into multiple portable roles. The D-V500 belongs to that exploratory window, where Sony is testing how far the same basic platform could stretch once audio playback had become familiar.