Exploring the loft unexpected finds, old film formats and cameras

I don’t venture up in my loft very often but early this week I needed to to store some boxes as usual it turned in to a voyage of discover and I opened up one of my old camera boxes to see what forgotten gems are in there. The Ixus

The first thing I pulled out was a Canon Ixus compact. From memory it was one of my wife’s old film cameras I picked up at the airport on a holiday trip and it had performed really well. The CR2 battery was flat so an easy fix to see if it still works.

First the good news. Everything seems fine with a new CR2 battery .

Now the bad news APS or Advanced Photo System was a cartridge style photo film with a 24mm negative developed in the 90s the film was thinner and up to 40 shots were possible in the small cartridge. Launched on Jan 1st 1996 it was designed to take the larger cartridge formats of 126 and 110 film and make it easy for novice photographers. But it didn’t stop there the cartridge was nice and small and had no leader so was easy to load and could be unloaded when partly exposed with out any faff. The top cartridge also had visual indicators to show if the film was unexposed, partly exposed, fully exposed or developed, very handy on holiday.

The Canon was a nice compact zoom with a a built in flash and great for holiday snaps.

Easy to use with some interesting settings. These are from Lanzarote back in the year 2000 There were dedicated classic,

Panoramic mode,

and high definition photos. All done by cropping the film mind you the quality was amazing all the same. Because of the film quality was better 3:2 same as full frame.

There was also a handy contact sheet and the photos were time & date stamped on the back. Which was very handy if you had taken a few rolls on holiday.

So photo buffs what went wrong, bloody digital and phones thats what. A few years after APS the first digital SLR cameras came out then the low quality compacts. The need for expensive computer equipment with digital stemmed the tide for a bit but not long not everyone carried a laptop around on holiday.

The film format didn’t last though by 2005 and 2011 it was all over Kodak and Fuji stopped production. You can still get out of date APS on eBay I did see one chancer that wanted £100 for a 40 shot Kodak in the UK But most of it seems to be in the US now and But the other issue is getting it developed as it needs specialist equipment and a bit expensive so there is not much call for it in the UK.

So Hive analog photo fans it’s a pity I can’t see me resurrecting the Canon Ixus in the near future if ever. The Canon Ixus seem to fetch about £25 on eBay but i don’t think I will be selling because the are a lot of happy holiday memory’s attached.