Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/02/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Kodak, and to a lesser degree Fuji, designed APS to try to drive processing to their own main labs. They were hoping that enough labs would not invest the 100 to 200K it took to convert to APS. Unfortunately, the one hour industry was consolidating at the time and the big guys saw APS as a competitive edge. Therefore, they spent the bucks so the main labs didn't see all that much of the film. The other side effect was that the little stores, because they could not do the film bad mouthed it(correctly at first as the early emulsions could look very 110 ish if exposure was off). Another difficulty was that only the Canon Elph took advantage of the formats ability to make a very small camera. So, Canon made out like a bandit with the Elph becoming the best selling camera in the world for a while; everyone else sucked wind. The Christmas season on 2000 saw APS market penetration hitting something like 15% of P/S sales. Christmas season 2001 saw APS hit single digit market share. Minolta does need the money, their APS offerings aren't selling well so why not admit the obvious and get out? Nikon is also probably out. Kodak brought out their Preview but the price point was off so it didn't sell well. Last, Olympus and Pentax, who didn't sign on to APS kept bringing out smaller cameras that did most of what APS does for less money. Don Dory dorysrus@mindspring.com - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html