Originally posted by 6BQ5 Anyone here shoot instant film for the fun and experience? Has anyone tried this pricey Impossible Film?
The Impossible Project is like small craft brewing, only they are trying to piece together the recipe from the artifacts rescued from the Polaroid sites. I've seen a few prints and the quality of the output was highly inconsistent. This was not camera related, but development chemical-stability dependent. Lots of risk there.
I have a totally beautiful original SX-70 SLR with leather and chrome. During the 1980s I exhibited straight and hacked Polaroid shots in several galleries in Puget Sound. So much fun shooting and making that was.
Fuji bought the patents for the older 3.25 X 4.25 Inch Polaroid film packs, but not for the instant film for SX-70, 600-series, and Spectra Polaroid lines. One of my earliest cameras was the Polaroid Colorpak 2 which will take the Fuji FP-100C film. Three years ago, as a fund raiser for my daughter's middle school, I set up a photo booth with big lights and sold shots taken with that camera and film. It was a lot of fun, though getting groups of kids to stand still enough for ISO 40 film was a parental challenge.
You can still buy older Polaroid Auto Land Cameras in good condition and use this film. Some of those models had Leica viewfinders and maybe one model had a Leica lens and optional totally manual controls. Overall, I felt that the Fuji film was less vibrant than the original Polaroid--which was legendary for saturation--but still worth buying.
There is still magic to Polaroid photography.
M