Polaroid for many years now has been created a poor excuse for Instant Film in the form of Zink paper and prints with options borders, but a recent update from the company is teasing the return to their roots as an analog instant film based company. The Impossible Project has been working for years on resurrecting their film and can only get so far due to environmental standards; and Fujifilm has been the only other big manufacturer of instant film using chemicals and a full process to develop a photo. But earlier this year, one of the owners of the Impossible Project also acquired a large portion of Polaroid. So it was only a matter of time until some sort of return was being talked about–and I didn’t think that we’d be hearing news as early as September 13th, but it seems we are.
Update: One possibility according to comments is that the new beta film being made and tested could be under the Polaroid name!
According to a scoop found on R/Polaroid the company seems to be hinting that something big is coming that will hopefully return it to the roots that Doctor Land originally focused on. This would be incredibly interesting as they’re working so hard right now on trying to push the Polaroid Pop quite a bit–which is essentially a square shaped Zink spitting camera. These teasers are live on the company’s website. So let’s go through them.
SX-70, OS, 600, Spectra and 8×10 are all film formats that Polaroid used to produce that Impossible took over. But if it’s on Polaroid’s website, then maybe it means that they’ll be producing the film now? It could also maybe mean that Impossible Project will just be called Polaroid. I hope that that isn’t really the case, but let’s delve further into this.
For those that aren’t totally of the understanding of what happens with a Polaroid photo creation, it’s literally film development. When you shoot a photo, the rollers pop a pod that stores the chemicals. Those chemicals then go through the entire image and develop it.
The company is turning 80? Wow, quite a big time to announce something, right?
Oh man! Be still my beating heart! Analog dreams coming from Polaroid again? As I type this we’re literally in the middle of production of a number of other pieces that I needed to stop in order to write this blog post. Why? I’M FREAKIN’ HYPE ABOUT THIS!!!!!
Ohhhhhhhh!!!!! Oh man! For people that don’t know, you’re supposed to store Polaroid film in your fridge so that it doesn’t expire as quickly. Film is an organic material and just like the food that you consume, it goes bad after a while.
The ski goggles thing I’m not sure about.
And then there’s this last message. This could mean so much more right now.
It’s overall fantastic to know that there may be another big company that can take on Fujifilm with the power of Instax. And if Polaroid really, truly makes those analog dreams come true you can sure as hell imagine that I’ll be the first one on the line to sign up for all the film.
Head on over to Polaroid.com for sure.
Full disclosure and Editor’s Note: I’m a moderator for R/Polaroid. Am I plugging one of the subreddits that I run? Yes. But you should stop on by anyway. That also means that the Phoblographer is the one to break this news as most folks typically sit there hanging out on R/Photography and not care about the rest of Reddit. So if you’re going to make it seem like you’re breaking the news about this stuff from Polaroid, guess again.Â
