Nikon's weird offshoot

Although it was intended as a replacement for Disc and 110 film in little point-'n'-shoot cameras, there were some SLRs made for APS. The Pronea 600i (sold in the US as the 6i) was the higher end of the two Nikon offered. While it could use any of the company's F-mount lenses, it shipped with its own APS-specific kit zooms that were not backwards-compatible with other Nikon F-mount bodies.

The dual control wheels for adjusting settings would be familiar to Nikon shooters today, but at the time it was a feature shared only with the top-of-the-line F5. (Another trait shared with the F5 was that both bodies were used by Kodak to build out into early DSLRs.)

The busy display on the back, however, was very similar to the quirky setup on the then-current N70. To use it, one would hold down the "Mode" or "Func(tion)" button while twirling the wheel until the setting you wished to change blinked, then toggle through the available choices in that setting.  In fact, in its feature set, the Pronea 600i could be looked at almost as an APS N70, which was a pretty competent prosumer-tier camera of the time.

The little hatch on the back where you dropped the film cartridge in is simplicity itself. No leader to worry about, just insert the cartridge, click the door shut, and the camera will whir the film out to the first frame...or the first unused frame, if you'd previously used the mid-roll rewind feature.

Pro photographers stayed away in droves and derided the format due to the negatives being smaller than 35mm, but that's like deriding 35mm for not being as big as 120 rollfilm. APS was intended to be more convenient for non-photographers to deal with, like 110 and Disc before it, while being big enough for casual snapshotters to still be able to print reasonably decent 5x7 or 8x10 vacation photos. (Which, actually, was basically 35mm's market position relative to medium format.)

Space Oddity

If Nikon's Pronea 6i looked like a prototype of the future consumer-grade DSLR and Canon's EOS IX looked like a Nineties sci-fi movie prop, Minolta's Vectis S-1 looked like...well, it looks normal now. If I'm walking around with the Hasselblad Lunar or the Fuji X-E1, someone inevitably asks "Oh, is that a film camera?" Despite it actually being a film camera, it's unlikely anyone will ask that about the Vectis.

It looks pretty much like a generic digital MILC or Bridge Camera from about ten years ago, not a film camera from 1996.

The lens this one shipped with was Minolta's V-mount "travel zoom". At first blush 25-150mm sounds like a super useful focal length range, but remember that shooting in "H" mode with APS film results in a crop factor of approximately 1.25X, so you have a field of view equivalent to about a 31-180ish lens.

It's a slow lens, too. Maximum aperture at the wide end is only f/4.5, and that falls off pretty quickly as you dial in the zoom and past about 55mm you're looking at a maximum aperture of f/6. The lens is also unusual in having no provision for manual focusing. Shooting the Vectis S-1 is a reminder that autofocus was still fairly new in 1996. It hunts a bit and is slow to focus; the 25-150mm is no sports lens, but that's okay, considering the camera's motor drive might deliver a single frame every second. It may look more modern than the EOS IX or the Pronea, but shooting it is a trip back in time.

The test roll, which is at Roberts now, was Fuji 100 that came in a sleeve of five, and the seller claimed had been cold stored. I manually set the ISO to 64 to compensate for the age of the film and, combined with the pig-slow apertures, exposure times on a sunny day were getting slower than 1/90th any time a small cloud crossed the sun. This camera, of course, predates any kind of stabilization in the lens...

Despite the off-center viewfinder, this is an actual single lens reflex camera, it just uses a rather more exotic arrangement of mirrors than the usual pentaprism or pentamirror. Despite that, the finder is crazy bright and features about 98% coverage, at a time when a Canon EOS Rebel gave you a dim 90% finder.

The film loads in that little trap door on the side of the camera. You press the blue "eject" button and the camera sort of whirs and chortles to itself for a second and then pops the hatch open to receive film. (It came with a manual so I need to read what you do if the two CR2 batteries give up the ghost while you have film in the camera...)

The thumb wheel will alter the aperture if you're shooting in aperture priority, shutter speed if you're shooting in shutter priority, and if you want to shoot in full stick-shift mode, the thumb wheel controls shutter speed unless you hold down the exposure compensation button while spinning it, and then it changes the aperture and leaves you longing for the dual control wheels on Nikon's Pronea 6i.

Minolta rated the camera as "splashproof" but I have yet to risk my $20 investment by splashing anything on it.

When it launched, it was not $20, but closer to $300. This was half the price of the Nikon and a third the cost of Canon's stainless EOS IX, which was so expensive it was only on the market for two years before being yanked in favor of something dumber and plastickier.

Minolta's V-series lenses are currently completely useless without a Vectis. There's no point in making adaptors for them because even the ones with "manual" focus use a focus-by-wire ring and the lens needs to be communicating with the camera for this to function. (Minolta and Nikon were the only ones to make APS-specific lenses, although Nikon's used the company's standard F-mount. Minolta engineered an entirely new mount for the Vectis...and collapsed and was absorbed by Sony in seven years. "Vectis wrecked us.")
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Oh, so that's what it means...

The APS film format came and went while I wasn't paying attention. It showed up a couple years after I'd stopped working in the photo biz, and by the time I was paying attention to cameras again, it was 2001 and I was buying a Sony Mavica digital camera and film photography itself was collapsing precipitously.

The Nikon looks like a regular SLR, while the EOS IX is self-consciously '90s cyberpunk

The name survives because what we currently refer to as "crop sensor" DSLR & mirrorless cameras use a sensor that gives a "crop factor" of 1.5X (1.6X on Canon) and is referred to as "APS-C".

As it turns out, there are three ways you can shoot a picture on an APS film camera. The standard one, which uses the entire negative, is in a 16:9 aspect ratio and called "H" on the camera, for "High Definition", since HD video was a new and novel thing at the time. There was also a mask that would crop the sides off the image to give a more traditional 4:3, referred to on the camera as "C" for "Classic". Finally there was a "P" mode for "Panorama", which aggressively cropped the top and bottom of the image for a 3:1 ratio, which returned 4x11" prints.

Note that the image was only cropped in the viewfinder, using LCD or mechanical masks, or sightlines, and the instructions for each print size were encoded on the film for the lab's printer to read. The actual negatives were all recorded full size for each image.

The name "APS-C" survives as the most common sensor size in DSLRs because sensors were crazy expensive to make. Camera companies had experience projecting images onto a piece of film this size, so there we were. As sensors became relatively cheaper, and relatively easier to make efficiently, ones that are the same size as legacy 35mm film became more common. (This is because lenses are the important thing in photography. Get bought into a lens ecosystem, and you're likely there for a while.)

Incidentally, APS-H lived on into the digital era as well. While Nikon's first pro digital body, 1999's watershed D1, used an APS-C sized sensor and didn't increase the size until going full-frame with the D3 in 2007, Canon thought that pro photogs needed more sensor real-estate. The sensors in Canon's 1D, their first in-house pro body in 2001, were larger, giving a crop factor of 1.3X. Because of this crop factor similarity, they were called "APS-H", even though they used a standard 4:3 ratio.

To give an idea of how much the price of the sensor affected the price of the camera, the APS-H 4MP EOS 1D dropped in 2001 for $6500, and a year later the full frame 11MP EOS 1Ds joined it in Canon's lineup for a whopping eight grand. That's better than $200/MP or, looked at another way, seven dollars per square millimeter of additional sensor size. At seven bucks a square millimeter, the head of a pin would be $28 and a penny would be almost two grand.

(I had thought that the Canon EOS IX and Nikon Pronea 6i were the only semi-serious APS film SLRs out there, but it turns out there's another!)
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The Last Film

You could be forgiven for thinking the Canon EOS IX is the "EOS 9", but it's actually the "Eye Ecks". That stands for "Information Exchange", and that's a key feature of one of the last...and shortest-lived...film formats out there, the Advanced Photo System format (APS for short.)

126 Instamatic, 110 Instamatic, Disc...each were an attempt to give casual shooters an easy-to-use form factor that didn't involve having to thread leaders on takeup spools while simultaneously preventing the clumsy-fingered from putting a thumb through fragile shutter components while loading the camera.

While indeed easy to use, these formats suffered from iffy image quality, especially the 110 and Disc, due to tiny negatives. The APS, on the other hand, had negatives almost the size of regular 35mm film.

The mode dial is relocated to the back of the camera because there's a little hatch on top where it normally would be on a Canon body. You just pop that open, drop the cassette (which has no exposed leader) in, and the camera does the rest.

Higher-end APS cameras, like this one, read and write magnetic data off the negatives, hence "Information Exchange". You can rewind mid-roll, and then reload it and it will advance to the first unexposed frame. It can record other data, like date/time or exposure settings.

All this was made possible by rapid advances in digital technology in the Eighties and Nineties, and those same advances would, of course, also lead to the creation of imaging sensors that would supplant film.

While 35mm film is still being made, APS sank without a ripple in 2011. This means that any you buy today is at least half-a-decade expired. The Fujifilm Nexia D100 I got claimed to have been cold-stored, and seemed to work okay. Colors were a bit muted.

It's a crapshoot on film, but on the Canons, at least, the APS cameras use standard EF-mount lenses, with a 1.2x crop factor. (This makes the excellent EF 40mm f/2.8 pancake a 50mm equivalent, BTW...) Similarly, the Nikon Pronea 6i uses Nikon's F-mount. Both the EOS IX and Pronea 6i use a pair of CR123 batteries, which is something kept in ample stock at Roseholme Cottage.

With the discontinuation of the film, the cameras are available for next to nothing, so it's a cheap experiment.
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