
Impossible I-1: first new Polaroid camera in 20 years - peteforde
https://us.impossible-project.com/pages/impossible-i-1-analog-instant-camera
======
peteforde
On a tangential note, I challenge you to find a better product video than what
Land had Charles and Ray Eames produce for the SX-70.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM)

It was the same team that did the famous "Powers of 10" short a few years
later. It included a rousing voiceover by Philip Morrison, an MIT prof who
worked on the Manhattan Project but later became a major proponent of nuclear
nonproliferation.

This video has a special place in my heart. It effortlessly moves from a
commercial to an instructional video to an impressively coherent discussion of
how it works before ultimately explaining that the camera is a tool intended
to further increase the true potential of humankind.

You can laugh all you want, but years later I cannot watch this without
tearing up.

~~~
addled
That was really, really well done. Thank you so much for sharing.

~~~
peteforde
One insight that just now occurred to me is that there's some serious
political posturing at work in this video.

Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin
tones. It used to be incredibly difficult to take good colour photos of black
people.

It's clear that Land wanted to demonstrate that the insanely great dynamic
range of Polaroid film was perfectly capable of bringing photography to the
black demographic.

~~~
ptaipale
> _Specifically, film in general was strongly biased to favour Caucasian skin
> tones_

I find it odd to call this "biased". It's about physics: due to light
intensity, it will be generally easier to photograph (capture on film or
digital sensors) objects that reflect moderate amounts of light with some
contrast, than objects that reflect very little light with little contrast.

~~~
thomasz
[http://priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-
wh...](http://priceonomics.com/how-photography-was-optimized-for-white-skin/)

~~~
ptaipale
Yes, film wasn't sensitive enough for black skin.

Personally, I'm inconvenienced by discrimination against tall people (for
instance, in airplane passenger seats).

~~~
sangnoir
> Yes, film wasn't sensitive enough for black skin

This was not a constraint of physics or chemistry: Kodak knew it, and they
didn't care much for black skin. This _was_ bias because they could fix it,
but didn't. Fortunately, Kodak _did_ ended up caring for other brown things:
_Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the company didn’t develop a
better film for rendering different gradations of brown until economic
pressure came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional accounts. Two
of their biggest clients were chocolate confectioners, who were dissatisfied
with the film’s ability to render the difference between chocolates of
different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture manufacturers were
complaining that stains and wood grains in their advertisement photos were not
true to life.”_

------
iamleppert
There have been a few of these tried before. I actually bought one and a few
cartridges of film a few years back. I took it to a few parties and out one
night and it was a lot of fun taking pictures with people.

Result? After the novelty wore off (and it did so quickly) I went back to
using my phone to take pictures.

If I were them I'd recognize this and either adapt my marketing to focus on
niche retailers, tourist destinations and the holiday seasons.

~~~
brudgers
The consumer grade novelty wore off Polaroids much the same way in the 1970's.
By the mid 1980's the cameras were available for $12 at the drug store and a
standard last minute gift. It as common for the included film pack to be the
only film that ever went in as the years whiled away with the camera in a
drawer.

The killer app was always scientific documentation with the intent of making
sure there was a photograph that captured what would be important later.
Putting a Polaroid back on a technical camera was another way of using
technical cameras to do what they were made to do.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
> The killer app was always scientific documentation

Law enforcement and investigations, too. For a while Polaroids were the
detective's camera of choice. But they died out quickly, just like consumer
usages.

Weren't they big on film sets to check lighting, too?

~~~
zdean
Yes...up until around 2005 I would routinely see them on photo shoots (that's
when digital started to replace film for a lot of pros). Now, I think they're
used but only on really large shoots...smaller ones do ok with light meters
and previews on screens/cameras.

~~~
stan_rogers
I can't think of good reason to use Paranoids anymore; digital works immensely
better. There's as much translation between media with Polaroids as there is
with digital, and you get both quicker turn-around and the ability to do a
decent mimic curve with digital. Polaroids had a narrow latitude and poor
contrast, so any density at all in the highlights meant you were well within
bounds at the top, and anything that wasn't an absolutely solid block of black
meant you had scads of shadow detail in your real image. Colour?
Faggeddaboudit - if it wasn't clearly purple or something silly like that, the
'Roid wouldn't tell you anything useful, so you'd have to do some sort of
weird interpretive dance across your set with a Minolta Color Meter III and a
set of gels if you wanted to avoid surprises coming out of the soup.

Polaroids also tended to have high to extremely high ISO/ASA numbers (compared
to the final film, which in my day tended to be 4x5 or 8x10 transparencies at
ISO 50 to 100 that cost somewhere between 10 and 50 dollars an exposure when
all was said and done). You could make that up (to a degree) with your shutter
shooting under hot lights, but with flash, not so much. And studio flash in
those days usually only had a two or three stop adjustment range, so ND gels
it was, and hope that they were accurate. All in all, a real pain in the
sitting-down bits, and if it weren't for the fact that getting it wrong on the
transparency meant a hundred bucks or so (two frames minimum per shot, since
dust bunnies can easily make their way into cleaned, de-staticked and
practically hermetically sealed film holders no matter what the laws of
physics have to say about it) and half a day shot to hell by the time you got
it back and dried down it wouldn't have been worth it then either.

Did I mention that digital is better in every imaginable way?

~~~
raihansaputra
yes but it's art. most people would use something that's technically better,
but some would prefer to experiment and use older, more unique technology and
tools. not saying it's better, but some do prefer polaroids and celluloid
films over digital sensor. I for example still use 35mm films for my photos,
and there is quite a large number of user and labs around the world to use
them properly.

~~~
stan_rogers
I was resonding to the idea that people were still using Polaroids for tests
on big shoots, not using it for their primary medium. (To my knowledge, only
the Type 55 pos/neg was ever really used as a "conventional" film, though
there were several people using pull-aparts such as 669 for one-off "fine art"
transfer prints. Yes, other Polaroids were used for their particular look,
often rephotographed for reproduction. But for the most part, it was all about
the "instant", whether that was for mementos, home-made porn or Polachromes
for putting together a quick presentation for the boardroom.)

------
Naga
This is a great idea. I work at an electronics retailer and teenage girls go
_crazy_ for Instax. I bet this will be even bigger.

~~~
sarreph
I agree from anecdotal evidence from family and friends.

I think this is a classic case of HN demographic bias, as (this is just a
guess) but I imagine there is a dearth of _materialistic /hip teenagers_ using
HN and as a result a lot of the comments here have failed to recognise the
importance of such a large market segment in reviving an original format.

'Old-school' and retro devices are somewhat coveted by the youth of today, and
therefore I don't think the arguments based on digital format and technical
superiority hold much water when a bunch of kids are gonna go nuts over
getting a change to use a Polaroid again.

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ck2
Story of "impossible" Polaroid film, bought their factory!

[http://techland.time.com/2012/04/07/the-story-of-the-
death-a...](http://techland.time.com/2012/04/07/the-story-of-the-death-and-
rebirth-of-polaroid-film/)

------
noobie
On a tangent but I just got a small pop-up saying " _You can only ship orders
to Tunisia from our EU shop._ ". Why don't all the stores have this? Instead
of letting me find out at checkout that they don't ship to my country they
could just let me know from the start.

------
feintruled
It's funny, when digital cameras first appeared I considered them somewhat
magic, a brave new world of technology replacing the outmoded analogue. But
recently, my kids went round to a relative's house, where they had an old
polaroid camera. The sight of this ancient artifact spewing out a self-
appearing physical picture blew their minds far more than digital ever blew
mine! They had no frame of reference for such a device. I look forward to
showing them cassettes and vinyl!

------
Qworg
I wish there were more shots of the device - that said, I really love the form
factor from the front.

------
Isamu
I'm glad, I had a Polaroid once too. They were pretty awesome. The original
folding SX-70 was amazing when it came out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Camera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Camera)

------
corecoder
Will they (and everyone else) ever learn that modal popups cause bounces? I
access the page from Europe, and this annoying popup obscures the page and
asks me if I'm sure I'm in the right place. Hint taken: hit back.

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peteforde
I have been following the Impossible Project's evolution from the earliest
days - even travelling to Enschede to tour the factory with Andre back in
2012.

I just hope that they adopt the Gillette "cheap razor, expensive blades"
approach. In my view they would do well to sell the camera at a loss and make
up the margin on the film.

~~~
elsurudo
Really? As a consumer, I hate that approach with a passion. I see how it makes
sense from a business-perspective, but I think people are "onto it" at this
point.

Instant film is inherently kind of expensive in either case, isn't it?

~~~
Apofis
Fucking $23.50 for a pack of 8 films plus S&H I assume. Fuck that shit.

~~~
peteforde
Nobody is happy about the price of film.

My suggestion is that you consider how - for a lover of the format - $4 a shot
is a cheap price to pay for something that realistically should no longer
exist, and that every pack is a kind of artistic patronage... a tithe to a
barely profitable entity run by a skeleton crew that rarely ever even meet the
folks that appreciate their efforts.

It's a specialty item. Unless you lose your mind over banking fees and the
price of artisanal chocolate in a boutique, you might be ignoring the bigger
picture: no price is too great for something you love.

Shipping new hardware is expensive, risky and very hard... but shipping old
hardware is just bonkers because there's no practical upside by any typical
investment standard.

------
akurilin
On a related note, has there been much progress in the past 20 years in the
digital SLR space (edit: for consumers / photographers)? Mirrorless is
interesting, Lytro was a cool concept but mostly fizzled out (edit: in the
consumer space). Is there much to be excited about going forward?

~~~
deepGem
Lytro hasn't fizzled out. They have just shifted their focus from consumer
cameras to high-end cinema cameras.

~~~
akurilin
You're right, I was specifically referring to their consumer camera model.

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Aelinsaar
I don't understand why people are supposed to want this, other than nostalgia.
"We care about analog..." and all of that sounds nice, but why? Is this like
some people still preferring vacuum tubes for certain applications, because
there is an objective benefit?

Is this just nostalgia?

~~~
peteforde
No: instant photography is genuinely fun and interesting. It leaves a real
artifact of a moment. As formats go, the square Polaroid just clicked for
people.

Tempted to throw down some cliched McLuhan quotes but instead I'll just point
out that Fuji Instax continues to be a big seller with teenage girls who
wouldn't know a Polaroid camera if it attacked them.

I guess another answer is that we still have supermarkets and restaurants even
though Soylent has been shipping for quite some time, now.

~~~
Aelinsaar
I don't see digital photography as the "Soylent" of photography, but maybe I'm
missing something. After all, your ability to print a digital photograph is
not in doubt.

I didn't know about the Instax though, so whatever I think, there is clearly a
market.

------
c-slice
What's interesting is this comes weeks after Fujifilm announced that they
would stop manufacturing their polaroid 100 film, which fit larger body
polaroid cameras. Really smart move on the part of the impossible project.

~~~
peteforde
What do you mean by that?

Radically different format. Still sad to see C100 go.

------
tlrobinson
What's the point of Bluetooth? I'd think part of the appeal of a product like
this would be its simplicity.

------
walrus01
coming soon to bearded skinny pants hipsters everywhere!!!

don't forget your portable mechanical typewriter so you can write your memoirs
at the local coffee shop.

~~~
peteforde
I am the OP so I can't downvote this, but man you have a crap attitude about
the things other people are passionate about. What exactly makes your hobbies
more legitimate than someone else's?

I'm a fat 37 y/o serial entrepreneur that hasn't had facial hair since my 20s.
I do like decent coffee, though. I guess that brings up my hipster quotient.

