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Photo Warehouse aka ultrafineonline.com has some Fuji APS film still for sale, and also some of the Kodak C-41 black & white Advantix film. The film itself is 24mm wide and would not necessarily be difficult to process in a home darkroom if you could adapt one of the adjustable plastic reels to that width.
Also http://www.filmscanusa.net sells APS film holders to fit most popular scanners (or you could just center it in the regular 35mm holders taping down each end to the glass).
Perhaps the bigger question, is whether there are any APS cameras out there that will work with reloaded, non-perf film 24mm film. The cartridges themselves would not be that difficult to reload (as many do with 110 cartridges for the Pentax auto 110 and a few others that do not require 110 perfs).
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Most APS cameras need the magnetic subcoating on APS to index properly, it is a different physical structure than any other film. I would surprised if you could just slit film and reload the cartridge.
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Here in the U.S., The Frugal Photographer http://www.frugalphotographer.com/index.htm has announced APS film is coming soon. Ultrafine on Line http://www.ultrafineonline.com/nsear...query=aps+film advertises APS film for sale. You can also find it on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&key...l_66fq5nif16_b
As for processing, try The Darkroom http://thedarkroom.com/, as will Bison Photo http://www.bisonphoto.com/
Never fear, there is hope for us "nitch" photographers.
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I don't have an APS camera, but I knew I'd seen something about new APS film recently, Bruce. It was the frugal photographer site, as you pointed out. They also have 127 film, although only one type (Bluefire Murano).
The thing that I dislike about the frugal photographer site is that while it sells film and recommends places to get your film developed, it discourages darkroom printing. It tries to steer people toward scanning and inkjet printing. I'll probably never buy anything from them as a result, since that attitude annoys me so much.
This is what they say on their main page:
To scan or not to scan...
The switch from darkroom printing to electronic printing is now almost (but not quite!) complete. Darkroom equipment is no longer being made. Photography teachers have almost all turned exclusively to digital technologies.
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Has anyone bothered to inform them that darkroom equipment IS being made? I assume they wouldn't believe that many of us very much enjoy using it.
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Sponsored Ad. (Subscribers to APUG have the option to remove this ad.)
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It might be useful to mention that APS was designed by Kodak, Fuji, Nikon and a number of other film and camera makers to match digital with film. The frame size of APS is the same as a digital sensor, and APS was designed to record other information bringing it up to the digital standard of exposure and date/time information.
So, other companies also believed that there was some life left in film, not just Kodak. Although we will never know what time line these other companies had.
Now, the crux of the matter is whether the present ApS films contain the information gathering information of APS and whether that is worth anything to anyone today.
PE
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Ron,
I covered the APS rollout in Hollywood and sat right behind Kodak CEO George Fisher and actress Jane Seymour. The presentation promised all kinds of tie-ins with digital technology that never appeared. Make no mistake, EK was the driving force of the APS program.
The real losers were all the photofinishers that invested a lot of money in APS processing equipment.
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Fred;
There were a lot of drivers according to my sources and they felt that film had a longer lifetime than we are seeing. However, to be fair, Kodak was more optimistic than anyone else. And, your comment highlights the failure of George Fisher way back then to not foresee the future, even though he is more charitable to himself.
He didn't dismiss the Technological Forecasting Committee's prognostications nor did he foresee the camera/phone integration in spite of his Motorola background.
A lot went on here that we don't know about.
PE
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Ron,
The APS program was well under way before George Fisher arrived. He got oversold on the digital tie-ins.
I think we all failed to understand how rapidly the miniature digital camera technology would develop to produce smart phones with very good image capture quality.
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Fred;
I'm just commenting on all of the good things that Fisher missed out on and all of the bad things he kept alive, and this is contrary to his comments in public about how he tried but "it would take 10 lifetimes to fix Kodak" or something pretty close to that approximate quote.
And, there were those of us in KRL who knew the growth of digital was faster than many believed. There were many instances where Kodak completely ignored the growth rate and market of digital.
PE
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