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FujiFilm Discontinues Last Film For Millions of Polaroid Cameras (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Polaroid stopped making film for its instant cameras in 2008. Thanks to Polaroid-compatible film from FujiFilm, many fans of instant photography kept on shooting with classic models such as the Big Shot, which Andy Warhol used in the 1970s. But FujiFilm has announced that it's discontinuing production of peel-apart instant film, which means that an array of cameras which survived Polaroid's own exit from instant photography will finally be orphaned. Could this be a job for the Impossible Project?
I am surprised there is still a market for instant cameras or instant film outside of hardcore enthusiasts, what with digital cameras being so prevalent and there being many easy ways to print directly from a digital camera with no PC involved (and even plenty of places that will print photos from a digital camera onto archive-grade photo paper)
No. No one but Fuji was making peel-apart filn for po!aroid Land cameras. Impossible Project is producing integral film for polaroid 600, sx70 cameras. Fuji was producing peel apart film, and Instax film for its own range of instant cameras that have nothing to do with old polaroid. The new polkaroid cameras are essentially using Instax technology. This is the end for polaroid transfers. You might see it in film emulation applications, instagram like frames, but the real deal is now history. Sadly.
Polaroid instant cameras were convenient, but that's about it. If the fixative wasn't applied just right - even in the auto-fixing cameras, you'd get sloppy consistency, fading colors and off-hues.
Within a very short distance of home - and many tourist destinations - are places where I can jack my phone in, upload pictures and have plenty of good-quality photos to share around within an hour. And one thing no instant-shot camera could provide: multiple copies.
If you're really into print-on-the-spot, as I recall, Polaroid even has a portable photo printer and it's probably not a whole lot slower than timing the developer on an instant-shot film.
Nope, read TFA. They produce film for later Polaroid cameras, not the peel-apart film that Fuji is discontinuing.
Oh no... it's the future.
Edison wax cylinders, son. Edison wax cylinders.
If their efforts end up anything like their non-peel-apart lineup, then it's truly doomed. I have an old Land camera and a 600 series camera that uses the integrated battery pack in the cartridge (and develops in open air). The film from Impossible for the 600 is dreadful. I've gone through 3-4 cartridges and got nothing but a blurry, faded-looking mess. At best.
You also can't point/shoot/eject/watch-it-develop like you could the original Polaroid. The Impossible film remains sensitive to light for at least 10-15 seconds if not longer, requiring hacks and tricks to eject it into either a box or under shade to make it develop properly at all. A real pain, all for vintage pictures that look like they're 40 years old the minute they fully develop.
A shame really, as they have been at it for quite a number of years now. I would have hoped they could have recreated a more faithful and reliable facsimile of the original film. I know some people have reported good results, but I was never able to come close
Never was true, never would be true.
In same cases, analogue photography is easier to fake than the skills needed for photoshopping, and just as difficult to analyse and debunk, if not more.
If you see something, take a photo. The pre-planning necessary to submit a modified form of that photo without the original being present or seized is so huge as to make anything other than deliberate set up impossible.
Your photos - digital or analogue - are prima facie evidence in most courts. Same for CCTV, and so on. And the penalties for deliberately crafting false evidence are incredibly severe to prevent any suggestion of misuse.
But that a Polaroid is in any way fighting for freedom is ludicrous. But yet everyone already carries a phone with greater resolution, colour accuracy, etc. And the fact that "random member of public X" has the same photo as "random member of public Y" means much more than anything to do with the devices they used to do so.
Canon Selphy range are compact dye sublimation printers with options of battery backs for portable printing with a range of printing options including PictBridge, off memory cards and USB sticks or direct off the phone using WiFi from iOS and Android.
To someone who has never seen one before, it still holds the same fascination as for those of us who grew up when it was invented, its still new to either of us at the time, whether they get bored with it sooner is the real question...
Therein lies the problem, not every market niche is profitable.
This is not a niche that is growing, a company here is not investing in a future hit. If the remaining users aren't willing to support an entire production line that line goes away. Fuji's exit says one of two things: 'They needed the money invested in that line for something else that was more profitable.' or 'The line was no longer profitable and never would be.'
What they have there are some old 600 cameras that work with film made by the Impossible Project, and a rebadged Fuji Instax camera that works with Fuji Instax film. Polaroid apparently has a rebadged version of that, too. The stuff they're talking apart in the article is what's generally referred to as peel-apart film or packfilm, for 100-series Polaroid cameras like the Polaroid Automatic 100, 250, 360 etc etc... They were a lot of them. Also, you can use the stuff on old press cameras, like a Graflex or Linhof 4x5. The pictures generally are of better quality than what you'd get from the Instax or 600-series integral-film. Obviously, I'm a fan, but this was a long time coming. They discontinued the 4x5 stuff years ago, leaving only the smaller FP-3000b (a great black & white instant film) and FP-100c (the color stuff in the article). Then last year, they stopped making FP-3000b. I was hoping that we'd get a few more years of FP-100c because of some sort of imagined manufacturing synergy with Fuji's Instax film (which remains very popular, it would seem), but alas! It wasn't to be. It's the end of an era, I guess; but film shooters like myself should be used to this sort of thing by now.
You've probably never heard of it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
These products are patented. If you so wanted, you could look up the patents and provided the ~20 years are up start up a factory and start producing them. The trick isn't the IP, it's the fact that no one in their right mind would build an entire factory to produce a product with such a limited market.
It's not an IP issue, it's a tooling issue.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Therein lies the problem, not every market niche is profitable.
This is not a niche that is growing, a company here is not investing in a future hit. If the remaining users aren't willing to support an entire production line that line goes away. Fuji's exit says one of two things: 'They needed the money invested in that line for something else that was more profitable.' or 'The line was no longer profitable and never would be.'
If it is true that Fuji was not making enough profit to continue doing this, they could have raised the price point so their ROI was in line with their needs. Then the market niche that is out there would have had a choice to continue using this media or not.
Compare this to dot matrix printers. There still is a niche market for very particular use cases. Today's dot matrix printers are expensive compared to when they were the main type of printer available and very expensive to compared to today's cheap dot matrix printers. However, manufacturers and buyers have found a price point they can both agree on.
It is quite possible that could have occurred with Fuji. It might have meant that the price would triple or more, but if there were a buyer at that price point then things could have continued.
If a niche market is not profitable, it isn't a market, niche or otherwise.
Kids don't have to pay for the film.
Kids don't pay for most things.
The film you get from the Impossible Project ranges from absolute trash that doesn't develop at all to trash that develops into a mess of blurry, unsaturated, unevenly exposed blobs.
You'll get much better results buying up old, expired packs of the real deal from eBay, though I'm not sure how much of it is still out there.
If you want a camera that works, film that develops, and a company that supports its product, get a Fujifilm Instax.
You get all the hipstery shit of a Polaroid with the benefit of it actually working.
As someone who has handled hundreds and hundreds of photographs used as exhibits for trial, I can tell you that the polaroid is pretty much the gold standard for evidence photography precisely because it cannot be messed with. (It can, technically, but tampering is an incredibly delicate job and extremely hard to conceal in practice.) The "negative" for polaroids is also the print, and their origin (and the image) can be tied directly to a specific point in time. Film is a little more consistent because there's way less variability in the development chemistry as a result of temperature (one of the problems with a lot of polaroid chemical formulations), and the negative is the more compact source of truth about the image, but film still has a two-step process from capture-to-printed-image. Both analog methods beat digital. They deteriorate on known timescales, with known effects from humidity and temperature, too, so it's easier to assess provenance and chain of custody. Further, any modification of the image, for film, almost always needs to be done at printmaking time. Usually this means lightening or darkening or color correcting, but you have to be an exacting master of the darkroom and enlarger to perform the time-consuming kind of editing tricks with printmaking that someone can knock off in 10 minutes with photoshop. Those skills (and the time involved) applied to negatives are far more challenging because you have to work with the chemistry of the post-exposure emulsion and the physical surface of thesubstrate itself. It still leaves evidence behind, too, no matter how hard one might try. Watch the X-wing and TIE fighter scenes in the original analog film version of StarWars, and you'll see ghosty-framed tracking boxes around those models as they fly through space. Those were done with frame-by-frame cutouts of images, with emulsions hand-painted over the cuts after gluing, but the optical properties of the film substrate itself gave the trick away, and that was at the very peak of negative image manipulation technique at the time, and you'll get loads of analog camera people who will argue forever about the question of whether it's still the peak, never since surpassed.
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