I wanted to tell you straight away but decided to play with my amsterdam wandering photos in poladroid-style first to see how it works and to see if I like it enough to share it all with you. And what is pola DROID? It is the COOLEST THING EVER!! The suspense of telling you about this little gadget has been killing me all week. I wonder if Fuji will make film that's compatible with any Polaroid gear - the new stuff was trash, but some of the older stuff (and Polaroid backs for MF gear) was pretty nice.The title of this post is not a misprint… did you catch it? Yes, I said ‘pola DROID‘ as opposed to ‘polaROID’. That seems like it would be pretty useful, especially in rural areas or in the developing world, where the problem isn't having an X-ray machine, it's having the processing equipment to do anything with the exposed films (which requires a processor and chemistry and someone to constantly monitor it).Ī physicist friend of mine once built a data recorder for an oscilloscope that used a modified Polaroid film back, mounted in front of the 'scope tube (he did this back before storage 'scopes were affordable) I doubt this was his original idea, but it was pretty cool at the time.Īlways sad to see a unique technology die. Someone told me once that Polaroid had tried to market a line of instant X-ray films, unsuccessfully, which always struck me as disappointing. The film was actually a pretty nice medium the cheap cameras just sucked terribly, and gave the format a reputation for looking like ass. What impressed me the most was how good-looking - for Polaroids, anyway - the output was. The whole device ran off of the batteries inside the Polaroid film pack (just like Polaroid cameras) so you knew it would always work, as long as it had film in it. They didn't sell too many, I don't think, and they disappeared pretty quickly, but I always thought it was sort of cute. You selected it, pressed a button, and it spat out a Polaroid version of your digital photo. It didn't have a full-color display or anything, just a little text display field that let you select the file on the card you wanted to print. It was a pretty neat device.īasically it was a little box that you loaded some Polaroid film into (I think it used the "600" variety) and had a memory-card slot, CF I think. What's interesting is that, a few years back, Polaroid - in a last-gasp attempt to find a way to cash in on digital photography and keep themselves solvent - produced a digital photo printer. Unless many stars line up correctly and the rumored Zink Polaroid camera (not the POS currently for sale) doesn't suck. This seems like a fairly cute little app, but I think, moving forward, this sort of thing is going to be the only retro-chic Polaroid that has any staying power. Fuji, who makes non-integral instant film, and their own format integral instant film, seems a likely suitor but they are on record as saying thanks but no thanks. If someone could put together a business plan with the capital to make it work, Petters has hinted that they would be happy to lease the license. They make decent risk-free money rebranding shitty DVD players from Korea, and their stockholders are happy. So, why should they invest in a dead technology for the (admittedly currently robust) group of people who are into Polaroid, particularly when the interest in the company is directly related to the technology being dead. The company that owns the the brand is Petters Group Worldwide, they specialize in buying brand names that don't have functioning companies, and wringing the last bit of juice out of them. How could they revert to the high end now, especially when the company that owns them, is completely uninterested. The cheap cameras kept things going for a while, but they moved the Polaroid brand from the bleeding edge to the ghetto, and in the ghetto it has stayed. The cameras that can take good, and even great, pictures, the SX-70 and variants, were expensive to produce, and the cost ended up being too great for consumers to bear in the face of 1-hour developing. All for a print that is tiny and lousy by contemporary standards. The film, however, is fairly complicated, fragile, extremely expensive (generally about $1.30 a shot), and requires chemicals and manufacturing equipment that is (so they say) harder and harder to come by. The cameras, at least the contemporary 600 cameras, are basically cheap garbage, no trick to producing them cheaply and by the truckload. The issue with integral Polaroid film is just that - the film. Things like this are proof to me that enough people love Polaroid as a retro-chic item to keep it in business.
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