Like it or not, the camera phone represents the culmination of what the photographic industry had been trying to achieve for the best part of 150 years. It’s a compact device that’s easily carried anywhere and delivers an acceptable result in most situations without requiring anything more than the press of a button. Of course, it helps that you can now essentially run your life with your smartphone, but the photography element was where the compact point-and-shoot camera was always heading… minimum fuss, maximum reward.
There was a good century of development from rollfilm to ever smaller format films packaged in various cassettes and cartridges – 35mm, 126, 110 and Disc – designed to make for easier handling with fewer mistakes. Each succeeded to some extent, but there was always room for improvement and so, in the early 1990s, work began on the most ambitious cartridge-based film system ever devised - the Advance Photo System.
