In Film, What’s Old May Still Be New Again

We recently published an affectionate look at a Polaroid Land camera, whose peel-apart instant film is long out of production except for a very few single exposure packs form a boutique manufacturer. All that was left was a discussion of modifying it for conventional roll film, or perhaps hacking a modern back-to-front Polaroid sheet into it.

Never say never though, because along come the Chinese company Light Lens Lab with a short announcement at the end of a post talking about grain structures and anti-halation layer materials for their black and white film.

Lastly, with our future development plan, we are currently developing and researching instant peel-apart film, with plans on producing and making available black and white peel-apart film by 2025 in various format. We aim to have an update on our packaging and test shot for the next development/research progress installment. We are also researching, developing and producing colour reversal films that consist of a dye-incorporating development process, commonly known as K-14, for 135 and 120 formats in 2026.

So there you go, no sooner has Hackaday declared a format unavailable, than it shows every sign of reappearing. At this point we’d like to take the opportunity to report that McDonalds Szechuan Chicken McNugget sauce will never ever be available again. Continue reading “In Film, What’s Old May Still Be New Again”

A Vintage Polaroid Camera Goes Manual

There once was a time when all but the most basic of fixed focus and aperture cameras gave the photographer full control over both shutter speed and f-stop. This allowed plenty of opportunity to tinker but was confusing and fiddly for non-experts, so by the 1960s and ’70s many cameras gained automatic control of those functions using the then quite newly-developed solid state electronics. Here in 2023 though, the experts are back and want control. [Jim Skelton] has a vintage Polaroid pack film camera he’s using with photographic paper as the film, and wanted a manual exposure control.

Where a modern camera would have a sensor in the main lens light path and a microcontroller to optimize the shot, back then they had to make do with a CdS cell sensing ambient light, and a simple analog circuit. He considered adding a microcontroller to do the job, but realized that it would be much simpler to replace the CdS cell with a potentiometer or a resistor array. A 12-position switch with some carefully chosen resistor values was added, and placed in the camera’s original battery compartment. The final mod brought out the resistors and switch to a plug-in dongle allowing easy switching between auto and switched modes. Result – a variable shutter speed Polaroid pack camera!

Sadly the film for the older Polaroid cameras remains out of production, though the Impossible Project in the Netherlands — now the heirs to the Polaroid name — brought back some later versions and have been manufacturing them since 2010. Hackers haven’t been deterred though and have produced conversions using Fuji Instax film and camera components, as with this Polaroid portrait camera, and [Jim]’s own two-camera-hybrid conversion.