Stability of 'Polaroid' shots

[johnfromnorwich]

A friend of mine is reporting poor stability of 'impossible project' shots taken with her aged SLR680. "A gradual drift to blue" apparently - over the course of a few weeks. Is this normal? I would have thought hat once the film is out of the camera, it's done.

 

[Cesare]

I think that's a known problem with the impossible project stuff. In fact, plenty of people are playing with it as you tend to get a burnt look to shots with time. I believe they are getting better at making stable film, so it's probably one of these things that can very batch by batch...

 

[sideshowbob]

The people I know who use Impossible Project film scan it as soon as possible, because it seems to just carry on changing. It's not remotely stable at the moment, as far as I can tell.

 

[Tantris]

The original idea was to replicate Polaroid. Obviously they have not been able to do so, as the manufacturing process is much more complex than they realised. Consequently they are now selling a product where the marketing and packaging costs more than the film, and it is aimed at a segment which is all about 'surprise-me-with-how-this-develops'. There is a huge difference between controlled aleatorism, and random luck, and no serious photographer I know would contemplate using this product now.

 

[barrymidd]

Isn't the Polaroid process heavily protected with patents?

 

[Anex]

Polaroid went bust and sold the factory on.

 

[Tantris]

Isn't the Polaroid process heavily protected with patents?

The patents date back to the 1940s and 50s, and have largely expired. They have been scrutinised in detail by those hoping to replicate Polaroid, but most of the know-how is not described in detail in the patent, and has probably been lost after the closure of the manufacturing facilities and the redundancy of key technical staff. A similar thing happened with Autochrome, which used grains of dyed potato starch to produce a colour transparency with a unique beauty.

 

[Derek Wright]

Perhaps Kodak have details of their instant picture process that was stopped because it infringed some of Polaroids patents.