Advanced Photo System

~ the obituary ~

Kodak started this in the mid-eighties under the name Project Orion, and by 1991 it had pulled in Canon, Fujifilm, Minolta and Nikon to build it with. The alliance was announced publicly in 1992 and the system launched at the Photo Marketing Association show in Las Vegas in February 1996. George Fisher, running Kodak at the time, said half a billion dollars had gone in already and expected to spend about the same again.

The product was a 24mm film in a sealed plastic cartridge you dropped into the camera without threading anything. Along the edge of the film ran a transparent magnetic layer, which is the part worth remembering: the camera wrote the exposure settings, the date and your chosen print format onto the film itself, and the lab machine read them back and adjusted. That is metadata attached to an image, written at capture, years before anyone said the word EXIF out loud.

Nobody wanted it. The frame was 58 percent of the area of a 35mm frame, so prints were worse at the same size, and no serious photographer was going to accept that in exchange for convenience. The film stock choice stayed narrow. Meanwhile the first consumer digital cameras appeared in the same twelve months, and by 2000 the argument was over. Kodak ended APS camera production in January 2004. Kodak and Fujifilm were the last two making the film and both stopped in 2011.

This one landed on Turkey the way premium consumer formats usually did, which is to say barely. Photography here in 1996 meant 35mm and a shop on the street that gave you back an envelope of prints with the negatives in a sleeve. APS asked for a more expensive camera and a lab that had bought new equipment for it, in a country where the whole point of the existing arrangement was that it was cheap and every neighborhood had one. I have never held an APS cartridge. Most people I know here never saw one either, and the format was dead everywhere before anybody had to explain why.

~ the case file ~

~ what was actually in the cartridge ~

The film never left the cartridge in the user's hands. It wound out inside the camera, wound back in when finished, and came back from the lab still in it, with the developed negatives spooled inside and an index print showing the thumbnails. Four small indicators on the end of the cartridge told you its state: unexposed, part-exposed, exposed, processed. You could pull a half-shot roll out mid-film and put it back in later.

The three print formats were the marketing hook. A switch on the camera picked C for a standard print or H for widescreen, with P for panoramic at the far end of the same switch, and the frame was always exposed at full width with the choice recorded magnetically for the printer to crop to. It is the same idea as shooting full sensor and cropping in software, implemented in 1996 with a stripe of iron oxide.

~ why nobody wanted it ~

Every one of those features solved a problem for the photofinisher or for the person who found loading a camera confusing. None of them solved a problem for anyone who cared about the picture. The engineering was aimed at the last mile of an industry that was about to lose its first mile entirely.

The one product from the whole system that outlived it was a name. Canon's launch camera was the ELPH in North America and the IXUS in Europe, a tiny brushed metal thing that people actually liked, and when Canon moved to digital compacts it carried the IXUS name straight across. So the most successful thing APS produced was a brand for cameras that did not use APS.

~ the drawer problem ~

There are a lot of these cartridges still in houses. Because the film stays sealed, an APS roll is not something you can hold up to a window to see what is on it, and the machine that opens the cartridge and pulls the negatives out is a piece of lab equipment that stopped being made two decades ago. A handful of specialist scanning services still handle them, by post, for a fee per cartridge.

That is a different failure from a format simply going out of print. A 35mm negative from 1996 can be scanned on a flatbed by anyone with sixty dollars and an afternoon. An APS cartridge from the same year requires finding one of the few remaining people with the right hardware and mailing your only copy to them. The convenience that was supposed to be the entire argument for the format is exactly what makes it unreadable now.

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