Anyone Playing With Polaroid Impossible Project Film?

Found a pretty clean Polaroid Sun 600 LMS camera in a box in the basement. Seems pretty clean and I suspect it would work. All I'm seeing as film goes is either 8+ year old vintage stuff (at almost $50 for 10 shots) or film from The Impossible Project that runs about half that. Seems the new stuff is far more light sensitive and needs to be kept darker for longer before it fully develops and/or can be exposed to outside light. Can't seem to get definitive answers around a lot of what current film will do vs. what happened a year ago or longer. Seems real temperature sensitive, blah, blah, blah...

Literally a bunch of kids talking about it on YouTube, complaining and yet embracing the inconsistency of the film. What I'm looking for is real world experience, then and/or preferably now. $25 isn't a lot to invest in figuring out something, and I suspect I could enjoy playing with it, particularly if I don't need to worry about light hitting it after 5-10 seconds (that's the thing the seemed to be "working on" a year ago).

My youngest bought one of those at a flea market and got a pack of film off e-bay. I'll need to ask him how they came out. If memory serves he got the high speed daylight film for $20.00 or so.

Someone gave my mom a Polaroid camera, but I never cared for its photos. The photos lost a lot of their color over time and were not overly colorful to begin with. If I remember, there was a slight greenish tint to its photos when compared against 35mm photos.

Have some fun with it--will be interesting to see what you can do.

weebee said:

My youngest bought one of those at a flea market and got a pack of film off e-bay. I'll need to ask him how they came out. If memory serves he got the high speed daylight film for $20.00 or so.

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I'm guessing he got NOS Polaroid film. I'm really interested in the new stuff from The Impossible Project, a group of folks who bought the old Polaroid factory but not the rights to the film formulas. They've apparently done a pretty good job reformulating them, but where Polaroid had developed a blue coating on their later instant film (the stuff you didn't have to peel back) that immediately protected the chemicals from light, my understanding is that the new stuff needs to be kept in the dark for several minutes and can take up to 30 minutes to fully develop. Not exactly instant.

I tend not to be interested in experimental stuff like this (I can screw with several different filter programs to get a 'Polaroid look'), but I can see where these might be cool in compositing ideas. I definitely wouldn't be looking for anything realistic looking as that's the only charm these hold. But when you're firing off at $3-4 a frame you want the film to do what you expect it to do and not just hack a lung because it caught some sunlight (though I suspect light-leak stuff can make for artistic looks as well). There just isn't much in the way of solid, and recent reviews of the stuff.

BackdoorHippie said:

I'm guessing he got NOS Polaroid film. I'm really interested in the new stuff from The Impossible Project, a group of folks who bought the old Polaroid factory but not the rights to the film formulas. They've apparently done a pretty good job reformulating them, but where Polaroid had developed a blue coating on their later instant film (the stuff you didn't have to peel back) that immediately protected the chemicals from light, my understanding is that the new stuff needs to be kept in the dark for several minutes and can take up to 30 minutes to fully develop. Not exactly instant.

I tend not to be interested in experimental stuff like this (I can screw with several different filter programs to get a 'Polaroid look'), but I can see where these might be cool in compositing ideas. I definitely wouldn't be looking for anything realistic looking as that's the only charm these hold. But when you're firing off at $3-4 a frame you want the film to do what you expect it to do and not just hack a lung because it caught some sunlight (though I suspect light-leak stuff can make for artistic looks as well). There just isn't much in the way of solid, and recent reviews of the stuff.

Click to expand...

Ah, he bought the old NOS one. I need to read up on this Impossible project.

So, my film from the Impossible Project showed up Tuesday. I'm completely underwhelmed. 8 shots for for about $24. Film is EXTREMELY light sensitive, from what I'm told, so I'm forced to carry a card in my pocket to place over the print immediately as I remove it from the camera (I bought the extra long "frog tongue" from them as well which remains over the image after the shot instead of pulling back immediately as the old one did). Bit of a PITA, but so's developing your own negatives, right? The kicker for me is developing time. I kept reading "about 30 minutes" for a shot to develop. Truth is that after an hour it looked faded and without many details, but at 16 hours there was a lot more to see. Colors are still extremely muted at 36 hours and I don't know if it's stopped developing or not. I'm told that I need to keep it out of direct sunlight until the chemicals harden and the image is stiff.

I can see the charm of this in a very lo-fi way, and if I was more the art photographer I might really explore it. The feeling of "I never know what I'm going to get" again has an artistic excitement about it as well, but again that's not me.

So I suspect that I won't be ponying up any more cash for this stuff, but the remaining 23 photos I have (including B&W film) have an opportunity to convince me otherwise.