----- Original Message ----- From: Bowman, John Subject: re:APS Film
My local camera shop sez that Agfa and Konica are going to stop producing APS film very soon, and all the majors are going to stop making cameras for the format within a couple of years. If that happens, I can't see Fuji staying in the game, they only do high volume fast turnaround products. I suspect that Kodak will be the only player within a few years, and they will get out of the format within 5 years. The APS target market is young (median age range 15 to 30) people who don't need the higher quality available from larger film formats. This group tends to share their pictures electronically as email attachments or web based photo albums, and for the most part already have computers, or access to them, and are savvy about the ways of the things. They don't really care about (or even want) paper photographs, and often the print is just a temporary storage medium until they get the image to a scanner. The TV ads I have seen recently for digital cameras seem targeted at the same group of people as APS is targeted to. If they can get digital cameras at a reasonable price point with a good feature set, and that is coming very quickly, APS will go away very quickly. For myself, I look forward to the demise of that hateful little format. It really is plagued by a lot of problems. If APS was a computer OS, it would be called Windows. William Robb - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
