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Post by nikkortorokkor on Aug 17, 2007 0:56:12 GMT -5
Is it Collectable? Is it a Future Classic? Is it the camera that killed Minolta? You be the judge! This one is getting no bites on TradeMe www.trademe.co.nz at a BUY NOW of NZ$60 (a bargain for overseas buyers now that the NZ$ is tumbling again). I see 'em starting at US$ 17.45 used on the 'bay. I was temporarily tempted, but as I never really saw the point of APS at the time (I was primarily an E6 user in the late 90s) I decided that the Vectis S1 won't be my next big obsession  It may be that lenses could be picked up for not much money from shops that were brave enough to buy into a system wrapped around the 90s edition of Kodak's film for the decade.  |
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Post by Rachel on Aug 17, 2007 3:26:08 GMT -5
Is it a Vectis? APS cameras don't seem to sell well.
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Post by nikkortorokkor on Aug 17, 2007 5:50:53 GMT -5
yes Rachel, it is a Vectis S1 it caught my eye because yesterday, whilst taking a break from the microfilm readers, I picked up a mid-1996 photographic magazine with a dissection of the Konica-Minolta demise (I do most of my research in a Public Library Archive, so there are always plenty of magazines to read on break ). The columnist blamed a lot of the problem on Minolta hitching it's wagon to Kodak's APS wagon, though he also pointed out that the Honeywell lawsuit had sown the seeds of destruction somewhat earlier. It is interesting though, to compare the Vectis design and even the concept, with some of the most recent DSLRs -especially from Olympus and Panasonic- a brick body with a stand alone range of prime and zoom lenses. Right concept wrong medium? |
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Post by Rachel on Aug 17, 2007 6:50:18 GMT -5
Michael, Canon also produced an APS EOS the IX. I've seen some at camera fairs. Here is a picture of one .....  Perhaps not as sleek as the Minolta but it does take EOS lenses whereas, I think, the Minolta had it's own lens range. The Canon didn't catch on either. I thought that the ones I saw were rather overpriced and there seems no future at all for APS especially processing. |
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Reiska
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Post by Reiska on Aug 17, 2007 8:16:08 GMT -5
It is interesting though, to compare the Vectis design and even the concept, with some of the most recent DSLRs -especially from Olympus and Panasonic- a brick body with a stand alone range of prime and zoom lenses. Right concept wrong medium? The similarity of Minolta Vectis-1 and Olympus E-300 /E-330 is really very conspicuous. It is hard to say what went wrong in APS concept. It had some convenient advantages like easy loading, film change "on the fly" and panorama function. Picture quality was at least acceptable and it made possible to make smaller cameras. I have two point-and-shoot APS cameras, Konica Revio and Canon Ixus and they served me well on a travel. What went wrong was possibly the fact, that 135 cameras were small enough and the picture quality was anyhow better. Canon IX is more expensive obviously because it uses, as Rachel writes EOS lenses, even if it's days are up, indeed. The RD and marketing was so expensive already in the late nineteens, that even big companies couldn't stand miscalculations in a row, one after another. |
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Post by Rachel on Aug 17, 2007 13:22:33 GMT -5
I think that someone else has pointed out that APS appeared at the same time as digital which is what probably killed it. Some of the advantages (?) of APS over 35mm depend on the special processing which was always more expensive and how much longer will it be available?
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Post by nikkortorokkor on Aug 17, 2007 14:08:12 GMT -5
I think you've both hit the nail on the head. For pro and amateur photogs, APS was obviously a non-starter. For the P & S crowd, digital was already the coming thing. In one sense, Minolta, particularly, made an awful gaff. One suspects that other big companies saw the digital train coming, and put their investment in that direction (or, at least, didn't gamble the farm on APS).
But the technology business is risky: remeber mini-disks? A hot way to record and store data in the late nineties, now totally blindsided by MPEG players and I-Pods. The record companies have it even worse- they totally missed the fact that the way they played the middleman in popular music distribution would be disrupted by the Internet.
As a measure of APS' popularity - or lack thereof - I was living in a Backpackers' Hostel in Brisbane, Australia at the time of its launch, and met a lot of the target audience for APS: young travellers with a camera. In two years I remember meeting one couple who were using APS. To put that into perspective, in the same timeframe, I met one travel photographer using a Hasselblad XPan. Having the same hit rate as a quirky, hi-end 35 MM panorama is not a good signall for success.
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