Impossible I-1: first new Polaroid camera in 20 years
us.impossible-project.com
us.impossible-project.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM
It was the same team that did the famous "Powers of 10" short a few years later. It included a rousing voiceover by Philip Morrison, an MIT prof who worked on the Manhattan Project but later became a major proponent of nuclear nonproliferation.
This video has a special place in my heart. It effortlessly moves from a commercial to an instructional video to an impressively coherent discussion of how it works before ultimately explaining that the camera is a tool intended to further increase the true potential of humankind.
You can laugh all you want, but years later I cannot watch this without tearing up.
Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin tones. It used to be incredibly difficult to take good colour photos of black people.
It's clear that Land wanted to demonstrate that the insanely great dynamic range of Polaroid film was perfectly capable of bringing photography to the black demographic.
I find it odd to call this "biased". It's about physics: due to light intensity, it will be generally easier to photograph (capture on film or digital sensors) objects that reflect moderate amounts of light with some contrast, than objects that reflect very little light with little contrast.
Personally, I'm inconvenienced by discrimination against tall people (for instance, in airplane passenger seats).
This was not a constraint of physics or chemistry: Kodak knew it, and they didn't care much for black skin. This was bias because they could fix it, but didn't. Fortunately, Kodak did ended up caring for other brown things: Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the company didn’t develop a better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
Result? After the novelty wore off (and it did so quickly) I went back to using my phone to take pictures.
If I were them I'd recognize this and either adapt my marketing to focus on niche retailers, tourist destinations and the holiday seasons.
The killer app was always scientific documentation with the intent of making sure there was a photograph that captured what would be important later. Putting a Polaroid back on a technical camera was another way of using technical cameras to do what they were made to do.
Law enforcement and investigations, too. For a while Polaroids were the detective's camera of choice. But they died out quickly, just like consumer usages.
Weren't they big on film sets to check lighting, too?
Polaroids also tended to have high to extremely high ISO/ASA numbers (compared to the final film, which in my day tended to be 4x5 or 8x10 transparencies at ISO 50 to 100 that cost somewhere between 10 and 50 dollars an exposure when all was said and done). You could make that up (to a degree) with your shutter shooting under hot lights, but with flash, not so much. And studio flash in those days usually only had a two or three stop adjustment range, so ND gels it was, and hope that they were accurate. All in all, a real pain in the sitting-down bits, and if it weren't for the fact that getting it wrong on the transparency meant a hundred bucks or so (two frames minimum per shot, since dust bunnies can easily make their way into cleaned, de-staticked and practically hermetically sealed film holders no matter what the laws of physics have to say about it) and half a day shot to hell by the time you got it back and dried down it wouldn't have been worth it then either.
Did I mention that digital is better in every imaginable way?
Specialty film for ID cameras was a big, big deal for Polaroid as well. DMV, passports, company badges.
Digital ID photos were the first major digital blow against Polaroid. ID photos don't have to be all that great, as a rule (meaning that early, low-res digital cameras were good enough) and the entities that used ID cameras were perfectly willing to invest a lot of money in a digital camera, if it meant they weren't burning through expensive Polaroid film (even back then, shooting Polaroid film was like lighting $10 or $20 bills on fire).
Scientific and legal uses (which do require high-quality imaging) got eaten by digital as well, of course, but ID photos were what first put Polaroid on the rocks.
I'm hoping this is a high-end camera. They already have the low-end market covered by the decades of old Polaroids lying around. I have an excellent 600 Business Edition ($30 ebay) and don't really feel the need to upgrade.
I think this is a classic case of HN demographic bias, as (this is just a guess) but I imagine there is a dearth of materialistic/hip teenagers using HN and as a result a lot of the comments here have failed to recognise the importance of such a large market segment in reviving an original format.
'Old-school' and retro devices are somewhat coveted by the youth of today, and therefore I don't think the arguments based on digital format and technical superiority hold much water when a bunch of kids are gonna go nuts over getting a change to use a Polaroid again.
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/07/the-story-of-the-death-a...
I just hope that they adopt the Gillette "cheap razor, expensive blades" approach. In my view they would do well to sell the camera at a loss and make up the margin on the film.
Instant film is inherently kind of expensive in either case, isn't it?
However, Polaroid has never cost 10 cents (adjusted for inflation) and it's essentially impossible (no pun intended) for that to ever happen going forward.
What I can say as a medium format film photographer is that having the constraint of knowing each shot has a real cost absolutely forces me to become a much better photographer. You just make each shot count and you'll end up remembering why you took each shot.
You'll never end up with 250 shots of a house party with dozens of nearly identical shots ever again. You'll take one shot that captures a moment and then focus on living in that moment.
People ask me if I would ever switch to a D-SLR. I smile and inform them that actually I've already upgraded from digital. You'd have to pry my cameras out of my dead hands.
I upgraded from a heavy DSLR to an iPhone. Now I can take as many photos as I want without worrying about the weight or the cost. I can concentrate on composition without worrying about focus or aperture.
I find taking a long series of spontaneous shots is better for making memories than taking one very thoughtfully composed shot. Sometimes my unconscious combined with luck is a better photographer than I am.
Is this better than your approach? Is it worse?
Neither. It's all photography.
But you're right. Whatever brings you the most happiness. I wish that you'd tried shooting film before jumping straight to iPhone. I shoot tons of photos on my iPhone, but there's a galaxy of difference between Instagram and the shots I'm proud of.
For what it's worth, I was deeply skeptical of film to the point of actively derisive until I tried it. Seemed like cultist holdouts and then I had no choice but to acknowledge that I wasn't seeing the big picture.
Send me your address and I'll send you a camera to borrow and some film to try out.
Maybe there's a compromise point. Perhaps market a far cheaper ($.50/print) but slightly lower quality film alongside a professional, $3/print, higher quality film. That's the difference between this being adopted by the mass market and surviving long-term, versus being a short-lived boutique medium for wealthy artists only.
The appeal is novelty, nostalgia, simplicity, tactility, etc. It's in the same category as vinyl records.
Here is my reasoning:
1. I love Polaroid and really want the Impossible Project to succeed in the long term. 2. The film is already expensive so perhaps if they increase the number of potential users they will keep the camera cost down and maybe even lower the price of the film.
Ultimately, the film is so expensive that I see it as a sort of patronage instead of buying film. Otherwise it would feel gross.
My suggestion is that you consider how - for a lover of the format - $4 a shot is a cheap price to pay for something that realistically should no longer exist, and that every pack is a kind of artistic patronage... a tithe to a barely profitable entity run by a skeleton crew that rarely ever even meet the folks that appreciate their efforts.
It's a specialty item. Unless you lose your mind over banking fees and the price of artisanal chocolate in a boutique, you might be ignoring the bigger picture: no price is too great for something you love.
Shipping new hardware is expensive, risky and very hard... but shipping old hardware is just bonkers because there's no practical upside by any typical investment standard.
I'm actually surprised they can sell it that cheap, given that they don't have anything like the economy of scale that Polaroid had in its heyday.
Trust me, you do not want your camera to be cheap. Well-engineered cameras are like putting an IBM Model M keyboard versus a Dell dome-switch keyboard. Not only will the better keyboard last forever, but it'll be vastly more effective during its entire lifespan.
You do not want your tools to be cheap, folks.
This is great for taking pictures indoors, at night, and for astrophotography.
Is this just nostalgia?
Tempted to throw down some cliched McLuhan quotes but instead I'll just point out that Fuji Instax continues to be a big seller with teenage girls who wouldn't know a Polaroid camera if it attacked them.
I guess another answer is that we still have supermarkets and restaurants even though Soylent has been shipping for quite some time, now.
I didn't know about the Instax though, so whatever I think, there is clearly a market.
Radically different format. Still sad to see C100 go.
don't forget your portable mechanical typewriter so you can write your memoirs at the local coffee shop.
I'm a fat 37 y/o serial entrepreneur that hasn't had facial hair since my 20s. I do like decent coffee, though. I guess that brings up my hipster quotient.