[Wheatfield]

In another thread I mentioned that I had a very small role in the development of the APS film format. I didn't delve into it there as it would have been wildly off topic for the thread, so I will tell my story here.

In 1983-84 I was the Quality Control manager for a local commercial photo lab. We were aligned with Kodak and had been one of the first to sign onto their Technet quality control reporting system, so they spent a lot of time with us.
One day they sent a bunch of marketing people in who sat me down and quizzed me on what I saw as major impediments to customers getting the experience they desired. In other words, what could Kodak do to make the customer's job even easier. They were doing a coast to coast tour asking all of their Technet labs QC guys the same questions, so it wasn't like I played any kind of major role.

They wanted to know what the customers were doing wrong that interfered with them getting the results they wanted.

Remember that at this time we had automatic exposure that worked fairly well, but not much else.

The problems I was seeing going through the lab were blank rolls of film caused by incorrect loading, exposure problems caused by forgetting to set the film speed and fogged film caused by opening the camera back without rewinding the film. Heat damage, X-Ray damage and age fogging were also problems but it was decided that these were outside of our scope, and Kodak was already working on making films longer lived and more heat and X-Ray resistant.
Combined, these issues caused a remarkably significant % of customer experience problems, though I no longer recall the numbers.

Anyway, the end result was that they concluded that a camera that did 100% of the film handling and also took care of adjusting the camera to the film speed would solve many of the issues that I was seeing.

Twelve year later, and well after most of these issues had been addressed by improvements in 35mm film handling, the APS film format was introduced to very limited acceptance and minimal market penetration. By the time APS came along, all but the cheapest 35mm cameras had auto load, auto rewind and DX encoding to set film speed.

The things 35mm never solved in the long term were fogging the film by opening the camera without rewinding the film or fogging the film through the felt seals. Agfa had solved much of the film fogging problem with the introduction of the Agfa Rapid system in the mid 1960s which used standard 35mm film. The Rapid film handling system also set the film sensitivity with an encoding tab on the cartridge. Kodak did something similar with 126 and later, 110 film systems. APS handled X-Ray fogging a bit better by having a fully closed cassette when it was out of the camera. 35mm has always had the weak point of the felt seals that could leak light if it was bright enough and that has zero protection against X-Rays.

My local camera store sold Agfa Rapid film for super cheap when I started my photography journey in 1971, so I was buying it and putting it into 35mm reloadable cassettes.

The APS system ended up being a solution looking for a problem, and was killed off in 2011 when it's film manufacture was discontinued. By then digital had taken over it's intended sector of the film market. I suspect APS could have been dropped five years sooner and not many would have noticed. It never accounted for more than a few percent of processing volume when I was doing the lab thing.

I left the lab industry in 2006, went back very briefly in late 2008, and left it for good in mid 2009. By then very little of our work was film, and in fact we were only processing film a couple of days per week to conserve the chemistry. It was impossible to run the machine continuously and keep it in control with the volumes we were doing.

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Last edited by Wheatfield; 12-31-2022 at 01:53 PM.

[TwoUptons]

I sold APS cameras in the 90s and was there when they arrived.

I thought it was a vastly better solution than 110 or (shudder) Disc...

I liked some of the customer service elements of it :
Panoramas without actually masking the negative, for example, so you could still print a normal shot from the negative and didn't have the fiddly mask that 35mm used.
Reloading to the next frame if you took it out (not all cameras did this, but only the Pentax LX and a few other 35mm cameras did this at the time) was cool, but not terribly useful.
The ability to store EXIF-like data on the magnetic backing on the film... some folks were even going to put a JPEG thumbnail on there at some point.
The thumbnail print, like from a Photo CD (remember those?) to allow rapid selection of negatives -- no more "you printed #1, I wanted #1A...". I'm glad that made it to 35mm...

I hated the most basic cameras, since they didn't use all the cool features, and I hated most of the fanciest cameras, as they seemed needlessly complicated.
But there was a happy spot in-between, basically for mid-range compacts, where it would have been a step up from 35mm in convenience, even if it was a step backwards in image quality.

-Eric

[Wheatfield]

I sold APS cameras in the 90s and was there when they arrived.

I thought it was a vastly better solution than 110 or (shudder) Disc...

I liked some of the customer service elements of it :
Panoramas without actually masking the negative, for example, so you could still print a normal shot from the negative and didn't have the fiddly mask that 35mm used.
Reloading to the next frame if you took it out (not all cameras did this, but only the Pentax LX and a few other 35mm cameras did this at the time) was cool, but not terribly useful.
The ability to store EXIF-like data on the magnetic backing on the film... some folks were even going to put a JPEG thumbnail on there at some point.
The thumbnail print, like from a Photo CD (remember those?) to allow rapid selection of negatives -- no more "you printed #1, I wanted #1A...". I'm glad that made it to 35mm...

I hated the most basic cameras, since they didn't use all the cool features, and I hated most of the fanciest cameras, as they seemed needlessly complicated.
But there was a happy spot in-between, basically for mid-range compacts, where it would have been a step up from 35mm in convenience, even if it was a step backwards in image quality.

-Eric

Thanks for jumping in. I never saw the format from a user perspective. Index prints were a huge help when it came to reprints. Kodak's philosophy regarding the smaller format was that very few enlargements were ever made by the target market, and almost none of those few were bigger than 8x10. By the mid 1990s they felt film was good enough that the APS format could handle an 8x10 print on the very rare occasions they were requested.

[35mmfilmfan]

I sold APS cameras in the 90s and was there when they arrived.

I thought it was a vastly better solution than 110 or (shudder) Disc...

<snip>

But there was a happy spot in-between, basically for mid-range compacts, where it would have been a step up from 35mm in convenience, even if it was a step backwards in image quality.

-Eric

I think this sums it up, really - people will sacrifice quality for convenience, until entropy takes over and mediocrity rules.

[Lord Lucan]

I remember film APS being introduced, and I read some photo magazines at the time. The general feeling was that while still in their infancy, digital cameras would be the future, and that the hybrid APS was too little too late and would not have the time to gain traction. Personally I saw APS as a P&S format which would soon be superseded by digital as a P&S format, and that serious photography would remain with film SLRs for the forseeable future. Remember that this was when digital cameras looked like fag packets with a tiny lens in the corner (not unlike later phone cameras!) and had resolutions of about 500K.

When Canon intoduced an APS SLR film camera a little later I was concerned that the format was being taken more seriously and that 35mm film and its processing could become obsolete or expensive. I was still anticipating using film for many years to come, using Boots' develop, print and scan-to-CD service. I need not have worried, the press and user reaction to APS SLRs was largely negative.

My boss at work followed a similar dead end route with our archives. At huge expense he had them all microfilmed with some kind of magnetic digital data alongside, a proprietory system which used a large booth-like viewer that stood in the middle of the office. We younger techies all knew that we should have gone for a full digital option, but our boss didn't understand or like computers. No-one used the viewer afterwards, it was quicker to pull out the paper copies partly because the contractor who indexed them didn't have a clue about our work.

[Digitalis]

Interesting bit of history right there..I remember APS film, not long ago I saw a well preserved Nikon Pronea S for sale with a price tag of $250 in a camera store.


My older sister had a Minolta Vectis S-1, coming from a life of handling robust, thoughtfully designed and venerated cameras from the likes of Pentax, Hasselblad, Nikon,Canon and Leica my first impression of the physical qualities of the camera: it felt like a toy, and that it had possibly the oddest film loading mechanism I had ever seen.

The last APS camera I saw in use was a Canon IXUS compact in 2004.

From what I understand, APS was one of a few film formats developed without any influence from the cinematography industry.

[calsan]

A huge benefit of APS was that the processed film was safely stored in the aps cannister UNCUT and dust and fingerprint free. You had the serial numbered index print with the serial numbered cannister so could quickly find the photo you wanted. Then it was a doddle to get any reprints. A further benefit was that when I switched to digital in 2006 it was cheap and fast to get all my rolls of aps scanned to digital. I had dozens of rolls scanned same day. In fact at the tail end of APS era processing, they would ask if you wanted your photos as prints or on a cd.

It's also worth remembering that there was a time when digital was both expensive AND poor quality. APS was a good interim solution that provided time and date record for photos in an organised manner. You also could choose to print or reprint the photo with or without the date stamp over the photo. The prints would always have the serial number of the cannister and the photo number and date and time printed on the reverse. Actually, a great system. 👍

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Last edited by calsan; 12-31-2022 at 06:58 PM.

[Terry C]

At it's introduction, I forecast that it would fail, as every other attempt to reduce 35mm film size had done so in the past.

[zapp]

Today, we can separate the format factor from the film. APSC as format is alive as well as MFT and others. Nobody really cared about apsc film. DX coding and digiprint lab technology pushed film into the 21st century. Kodak messed up several times trying to control the market. Before, nobody cared about baby Rollei 4x4 format. Minox format was an established niche, the mass market was 135 or 120 film.
And so the worked sticks to 35mm fullformat sensors. Only medium format has changed since sensors in 56x56 mm2 are still not available in mass production - and medium format was never superior on per pixel or resolution basis, but the advantage was based on the smaller enlarging factor that resulted in better quality. I am leaving out dof here.

[kypfer]

I used one of the more advanced Kodak APS-C cameras as my "pocket P&S" for a couple of years … a brief review of the index prints shows complete sets of in-focus well exposed pictures … what's not to like?
I even invested in a module for my CanoScan FS4000US film scanner so's I could digitise the negatives … that still works!
Unfortunately, with the advances in "conventional" 35mm P&S cameras making them so much more fool-proof, (or, at least, idiot resistant), and the advent of digital cameras for the masses, the APS-C system as a whole became a solution looking for a problem.

[Jonathan Mac]

I remember when I was around 20 (2000) specifically looking for a compact that didn't use APS film as it was more expensive to buy and develop. The compact I bought should still be around somewhere - I need to find it and check it works. If it does then that will be another confirmation that I made the right decision in avoiding APS.

[steephill]

I only had one - Minolta Vectis Weathermatic Zoom | Camerapedia | Fandom I got it for snorkelling and shallow scuba diving in Bermuda. A friend who was living there got the Vectis SLR kit as an upgrade from a Zenit! I still have the APS holder for my Nikon Coolscan V which I got to extract as much as I could from the negs. I still have some film in the freezer.