The SuperSense One Instant packfilm is disappointing in so many ways.
Years ago, Fujifilm discontinued their peel-apart film–otherwise known as packfilm. It was instant and for years had been used by professionals shooting film to get a preview of their exposures. But, it experienced a bit of a revival when people started to get back into Instant film. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to keep it alive. And Fujifilm instead does Instax. But, the folks over at SuperSense decided to recreate it themselves. They’re a small team mostly working on a passion project–and it shows. I personally backed their Kickstarter a while back and received my film last year. But we were super busy, and it was frigid out, so summer 2020 just seemed like the best time to test is. So how did it do? Well, I’m pretty sad.
There’s a lot that’s weird about this film. As we show in our latest episode of Pro Camera Reviews, it’s sort of a mess. The darkslide is put in pretty loosely, and it’s made of a thin layer of dark plastic. Then, you have to load one shot at a time. Additionally, the darkslide can come out way too easily and therefore ruin the entire shot. What gives? There’s a ton of design problems, and honestly, this product wasn’t ready for the market. And then there’s the quality of the images. I have to admit that SuperSense did an okay job here, but it’s still pretty lacking.
Granted, packfilm is difficult for most people to use. They don’t know how to develop it, the temperature, how to use it correctly, manual metering, etc. It’s nowhere as user friendly as Instax is, and maybe that’s part of Instax’s success. One can blame just how clueless most folks are about photography for that. But, if you really stick with it, you’re going to love it. With Fujifilm’s stuff, you got both a positive and a negative. You could later bleach bypass develop the negative, and scan it for a beautiful image. But with SuperSense, you can’t do that.
Just for fun, I put the SuperSense One Instant pack against some expired Fujifilm 100. You’ll need to watch our video to find out how it did. But I’m telling you, you’re going to be shocked.
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