Fujifilm Nexia 400 (APS)

Nexia 400 sat above the 200 in Fujifilm's APS lineup, balancing speed against the inherent grain cost of the IX240 cartridge's small 30.2 by 16.7mm negative. The Nexia branding itself came in 2002, a rebrand of Fujifilm's earlier APS color print stocks once they dropped the APS reversal line entirely. Production ran until July 2011, when Fujifilm exited APS film manufacture alongside Kodak.

The Advanced Photo System story is useful context. APS was designed in the early 1990s by a five-company consortium (Kodak, Fujifilm, Canon, Minolta, Nikon) to let consumers drop a sealed cartridge in, pick H, C, or P aspect ratio in-camera, and let the lab read encoded data off the magnetic strip. It launched at PMA 1996 with enormous marketing weight. The first practical consumer digital cameras shipped that same year. By 2004 the format was dying in retail; by 2011 it was over.

As an emulsion, Nexia 400 sits in the Fujifilm consumer-color tradition, the same coupler family that fed Fujicolor Superia 400 in 35mm. Skin warm, greens accurate, blues slightly muted. The smaller negative makes the grain look more pronounced in any scan or print at the same output size. Next to Kodak Advantix 400 the look is slightly cooler in highlights and finer-grained in shadows. Press shooters and parents on family trips used both stocks interchangeably in the late 1990s.

Availability is auction-only, and the situation is worse than for Nexia 200 because higher-speed stocks fog faster in storage. Most surviving Nexia 400 carries date codes between 2003 and 2010, and a meaningful fraction shows visible fog or color shift even when cold-stored. Test a roll before committing.

Processing matters as much as the film. Standard C-41 chemistry works fine, but the lab needs a functional APS path: hardware that can open the IX240 cartridge, run the film, and return it to the cartridge per APS protocol. A short list of specialty labs still does this. Most do not.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered 4-second exposure becomes about 6 seconds at the negative. In the available-light hand-held shooting these cameras were designed for, none of this matters. For the rare tripod-mounted APS frame past a second, the math is small but real.