Like it or not, the smartphone represents the culmination of what the camera 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 cartridgebased film system ever devised. As ever, it was driven by Kodak, which had been at the forefront of popularising photography since devising the original box camera in the late 1880s. Looming on the horizon was ‘electronic photography’ which had already manifested itself with the still video camera – mostly championed by Sony, but plenty of others dabbled with prototype systems. While the analog approach was inferior to film in many ways, it made the point about potential conveniences, and work was well underway on digital technologies that would better exploit them.
Nevertheless, within the photography industry at least, it was still believed that film was the way ahead, but with a system that also had to deliver more conveniences than
