FOR A MATURE INDUSTRY, A REALLY NEW product can mean big money. (Think compact discs.) Or just big losses. (Think New Coke.) Last week five famous names in photography took the plunge. Film giants Kodak and Fuji, along with cameramakers Canon, Nikon and Minolta, jointly introduced the Advanced Photo System (APS), the first new approach to film-based picture taking since the early 1980s.
What will hit the stores in April is an interesting but not quite revolutionary product line. The cameras are lighter and smaller. They print such things as date and location on the back of each picture, not the...