APS & the Analog Photo Slideshow

Your photos are really good

Cool! Great video as always. It's very interesting that such a device would be produced for this specific format. My brother had a Fuji Advantix camera. We thought it was really cool that you could choose three different sizes for the photos to be printed. Of course looking back now, it's easy to see they are simply cropped versions (depending on your selection). I still have some of his film, at least it's good to know I could crack open the canister and scan the images in if I wanted.

The only APS film I remember using was in a disposable camera I got during summer camp (it was a college camp, not an outdoor camp).

Canon released the same device under the name Canon photo-video player IP-100. The name APS still lives as a sensor size for slr/system camera’s. In 1999 I actually had an APS camera for my year back packing in Australia. Still have the APS cassettes..

Oh that music. Surely written by whoever was responsible for the soundtrack to Donkey Kong and its like. Nice gesture btw to send the machine to Phil. Thanks for the video.

Great video! I bet you almost gave up completely on that one but glad you stuck it out to show us!

This is a superb video. I love this era of technology, which I've been calling the "zip drive era." It was the period of time between 1997-ish to 2003-ish. We had outgrown all the 80s-90s technology like hooking up stuff over RF antenna cable on channel 3, but the technology to replace it wasn't quite ready. Add in every company being certain that THEIR proprietary ecosystem is the one that every consumer on the planet will adopt and you wind up with landfills full of kooky devices like this.

Trying to recall if I ever used that film type. I remember having film canisters that I would send in and get back with the film still in them. I don't remember the camera having the 3 position selector though. Perhaps a lower end model that didn't, or perhaps I just never noticed it was there.

My first digital camera was a Canon Digital Ixus - 1.3MP - cost over £500 if memory serves me... Mat, have you ever looked at the Canon Ion - it was a still-frame electronic camera which recorded single 'video' frames one-per-track on a tiny floppy-disc, in much the same way as a VCR records video frames as stripes on a tape.

My family went straight from film to digital. I still have our first digicam, a Kodak DC-40, and i wont give it away for anything. For todays standards it sucks, but it is a memorabilia, the same reason i still have a DCC player in some drawer, even if i could kick myself for throwing away the battery.

That background music your Fuji scanner plays ... reminiscent of the "on hold" tunes early Japanese office phone systems played!

Cool, that Digital Ixus is the camera that I bought to take on my honeymoon. Took a lot of pictures of Rome, Florence, Venice and Milan, but battery life was absolutely rubbish. We had to buy a spare battery in Florence (next to the Duomo if memory serves me right) and it was still rubbish.

The APS film system had double misfortunes: It offered low image quality when compared to standard 35mm film, and it hit the market just before digital photography became affordable. Thus it failed in both the amateur and semi-pro markets. Its failure was a major financial contributor to the collapse of Eastman Kodak Company. As a collector of well-designed analog thingies, I have quite a few of the last and high-end APS cameras made. They were designed for compactness and contained a remarkable amount of engineering. Plus several of them have outstanding appearances. Google the Contax TiX, the Fujifilm Endeavor 3500ix, the Canon ELPH2 and ELPH 490Z, or the Minolta Vectis 300, to see high-style high-tech in tiny packages.

Great vid Mat, no lie, a week before you asked for films I had binned about 20 of Japanese Temples which would have been eminently suitable for public viewing - but I had had them scanned in a year ago and thought with triple backup, it really was time to let them go. I still have a disposable APS camera (very popular and inexpensive in Japan, back in 2002) sealed and new which you would be welcome to - although I guess as you say that's the end of your APS interest for now.

Used to work in a drug store photo lab in the mid 2000's and they were just as finicky back then trying to develop them. You'd have to insert the roll into an extractor machine that was supposed to open and pull out a bit of film to attach to a "leader card" which would then pull it through the developer. This machine however rarely worked leaving us to pop the canister open in a dark room and hand roll it into a spare cartridge we'd eventually give the film to the customer back in. Another interesting thing about APS film is if the film is not the proper length (i.e had been cut as you would do with 35mm film by an inexperienced photo lab) it practically renders it useless leaving us unable to scan the film to make any prints what so ever. Interesting video - but glad APS is a thing of the past

What a fascinating device - is there any indication of the resolution of the digital image produced ie how many pixels along each side? It used to be said that a 35mm film frame was approximately equivalent to 12megapixels; an APS frame has about 50% of the area of a 35mm frame, so I wonder if the Fujifilm device is delivering anything like 5 - 6 MP?

And to think that we can now get the same background music from a greeting card!

In addition to this being a wonderfully entertaining video, I had 2 unexpected laughs. 1. Imagining you behind the scenes troubleshooting the AP-1 for hours on end and all the while it playing its silly little tune. 2. At 16:55 when it transitions from beautiful landscapes and architecture to dramatically zoom in and out on those bystanders. :D

Your comments at the end are the exact reason I am slowly whittling away at my stock of Fuji instant film for the older Polaroid cameras. I love the ability to have a photo in my hand in an instant, but the uncertainty of what I am getting when the price is going up daily is a little.. hard to swallow.

Awesome video, I appreciate your perseverance when it comes to making items work! I remember seing commercial and catalogs featuring the APS system here in Canada. However I dont remember if it was a popular item.

Nice FM synth background music!

Great job! Thanks for taking the massive amount of time to finish this. I had never even heard of APS -- Well actually when I saw the logo it did look familiar and I might actually have bought it if I would have know about it back then.

Great video. And shout out to Phil!

You're not far off! I saw that holiday video and it reminded me that many people don't really get that phone cameras and conventional cameras have different ideas about what makes for a "good photo." The phone says 'I want this to be a good photo, so I'll make that blue sky nice and intense, which is what people like." The camera says "I want this to be a good photo, so I'll make sure that blue sky isn't super-intense, because that's what the sky actually looks like." Which isn't to say that any user is foolish for preferring the phone version. But it leads to misunderstandings about the actual performance of a traditional camera.

Great job , its,always a pleasure to watch your posts.

The APS name sort of lives on as an image sensor size for digital SLRs and similar - interesting how an intended-to-be-revolutionary new film format has disappeared so quickly! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APS-C" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APS-C</a>

Another proof of why I follow you Mat. Another superb video - it's sometimes really interesting when things go awry and watching you sort them out. And thanks to Phil as well. :-)

I’m young enough that my first camera was a 110 film toy camera, and then my second one was an APS camera. I shot almost everything in the panorama format since I thought it was so cool. After that I thought this whole taking photos thing was too expensive until digital cameras came into vogue. I missed the whole 35mm era. Loved this video! APS had a lot of potential, but it was just 15 years too late...

Thanks for going through all that hassle to show us some old tech! Have fun watching your old photos on your telly with naff background music, Phil.

Great review of a technology that couldn't compete with digital cameras!

Big shout out to Phil! And how cool that you gave him the AP-1! :D

Happy to help, Mat, great video!

I received an APS camera for my birthday as a teenager and absolutely loved it. I've got lots of prints and processed films in the loft (somewhere!)

Great video! I'd never heard of this product line before. I feel for you on the frustration of getting stuff to work. I have encountered that so many times lately, it seems. And interesting side note. Back around the time this product came out, I had started to get my photos developed as Kodak Photo-CDs. That way i could play them back on my CD-i player or my computer. So that was another way of doing it back then.

I have a Leica APS camera and used it recently. The snappy snaps amateurs did the same with my film. If you need more film developed send it to me

Wonderful video, thanks! Indeed a very in between sort of solution. I have boxes and boxes of these APS negatives and this really makes me want to get them out and scan them in to my photo archive. Hopefully there are scanning shops that can handle these developed cartridges better than they can handle undeveloped ones..

Phil saves the day!

Remember my parents having an APS IXUS, thing took horrible pictures and was broken beyond repair in about 18 months..

Yessss something for the children of the late 80s/early 90s (idk why I'm celebrating getting old, but anyway, great video)

Was just watching You make pasta on YouTube and then a new episode checks in. Thanks. :-)