28 August 1999
THIS week in 1999 AP was offering readers the chance to spend the night with Manchester United. Steady on, it wasn’t what it sounds like – although with Ryan Giggs in the team, who knows? The prize was part of a £5,000 package of prizes generously donated by Canon, which included the chance for 12 readers to photograph a Champions League match at Old Trafford in the delightful company of AP’s Damien Demolder, a night in Manchester in a 4-star hotel, and one of 12 camera kits ranging from the rst prize of an EOS 300 kit worth £429 (equivalent to £775 today) to a Canon SureShot 85 compact worth £100 (£178). For just 70% of the cost of Canon’s lowly point-and-shoot you could buy the ‘cheap, cheerful and very Russian’ Zenit 312M. A new SLR for £70? That’s just £126 in today’s money, which sounds too good to be true, and unfortunately it was. The generally ‘poor build quality’ and the fact that the meter didn’t work on the test sample meant that even at this price AP could not bring itself to recommend it. Also in this week’s issue, an exhibition at the RPS of the wonderful work of the hugely respected Guardian photographer Denis Thorpe was the hook for a six page pro le by Guardian Picture Editor and regular AP columnist Eamonn McCabe. AP’s weekly Pictures of the Century series told the story behind Tony Duffy’s iconic shot of Bob Beamon breaking the long jump world record at the 1968 Olympics – a record not beaten for 23 years.