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Polaroid Lovers Try To Revive Its Instant Film
Maximum Prophet nods a NY Times piece on a Dutch group living the retro dream: they are trying to bring back Polaroid film. This group has the machinery to make the film packs, but needs to recreate the chemicals. Polaroid Inc. stopping making the specialized chemicals years ago, after having stockpiled what they would need for their last production runs. "They want to recast an outdated production process in an abandoned Polaroid factory for an age that has fallen for digital pictures because they think people still have room in their hearts for retro photography that eschews airbrushing or Photoshop. 'This project is about building a very interesting business to last for at least another decade,' said Florian Kaps, the Austrian entrepreneur behind the effort [in Enschede, The Netherlands]. 'It is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world. ... If everyone runs in one direction [i.e. digital photography], it creates a niche market in the other.'"
I'm not so sure that people will be impressed. The quality/stability of these poloroid photo's was sketchy at best. You had to wait quite a bit of time for the photo to develop, during which time the photo needed to be handled carefully. The rather loud mechanism and large heavy camera is not going to impress anyone either. The seeker quality of most poloroid camera's would give you a nice hint on what to expect.
Basically the only reason why film camera's may not get extinct is because image manipulation will be (slightly?) harder with an analogue camera using film. The qualitity of current camera's is already good enough and in many cases better than camera's using film. Of course there is likely some oomph left for film camera's in niche markets and nostalgia is as good a reason as any. But polaroid? Good ridance.
Note that this is a plain old text message and that my line ends seem to go missing for some reason.