12 years after hitting the scene, and 3 years after rebranding to Polaroid Originals, The Impossible Project has completed its metamorphosis. As of today, Polaroid Originals is reclaiming the original "Polaroid" name, and celebrating this milestone with a new camera: the Polaroid Now.
Polaroid Originals has released its latest product, and it's an instant printer... with a twist. Rather than just printing digital files, this so-called "miniature table top darkroom" actually turns digital files into analog prints by projecting your phone screen onto a piece of instant film.
Polaroid is back. Days after teasing a major return to its instant photography roots, Polaroid has just launched Polaroid Originals, a brand new brand dedicated to analog instant photos. Along with the new brand comes a new OneStep 2 camera and the debut of a new film type called i-Type.
Polaroid has a huge announcement scheduled for next week. The company's website now features a teaser for a September 13th reveal, and it sounds like Polaroid is going to make a splash by going back to its instant photography roots.
Welcome Leica!
It is with a smile on our faces that we welcome another player in the instant camera world!
Analog lovers rejoice, those tears you cried for your old friend Fujifilm FP-100c peel-apart packfilm were not in vain! Impossible Project founder Florian 'Doc' Kaps has teamed up with Bob Crowley at New55 Film to save the format.
When Polaroid announced that it would stop making Polaroid instant film in February 2008, The Impossible Project was founded to keep the film alive. Filmmaker Jens Meurer has spent several years shooting a feature-length documentary film about the saving and reinventing of the Polaroid picture.
The Impossible Project made a splash in the world of instant photography last month by announcing the I-1, the first new instant camera for the film format popularized by Polaroid decades ago.
Everybody is "reinventing" things these days, but even still, we would be lying if we said we weren't at least intrigued by the all-new Impossible Project I-1. It's the company's very first camera, or, as they put it, "The Original Instant Camera. Reinvented."
In the spring of 2014, I started a long-term photography project focused on Syrian refugee children. I traveled through Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon and photographed children who fled Syria since the war started.
Want an inside look at how The Impossible Project makes its instant film? The folks over at Highsnobiety recently paid a visit to the company's factory in Enschede, which it purchased from Polaroid and rebooted. The 3-minute video above shows various steps of the instant film creation process, from development, to assembly, to boxing it up for shipping.
In the digital age, there is a demand for instant gratification; however, is it possible that the perfect solution for the modern individual is an analog one? Instant film was a product introduced during the late 1940s and remains a popular option for instant physical prints to this day. Hold up your camera, press a button, and minutes later you have a fully processed physical image. And to think that it all started with a little girl’s simple question…
The Impossible Project CEO Creed O’Hanlon dropped quite the statement and statistic in an article on the resurgence of Polaroids by The Guardian.
"Teens," O'Hanlon said, "[are] turning their backs on digital for something more tangible." A fact he says is backed up by explosive growth in their sales to the 18-25 year old demographic.
The Impossible Project, the ongoing effort to keep classic Polaroid cameras alive and well-fed, has added a splash of color to its catalog with three new special edition SX-70 that films sport gold, silver and colored borders instead of the usual white.
When The Impossible Project announced its Impossible Instant Lab back in September 2012, it turned to Kickstarter to raise $250,000 to fund the project. After the Internet got wind of the smartphone-to-instant-photo printing device, the fundraising campaign blew past its goal and ended up with a total of $559,232 from 2,509 supporters.
Today the company announced that the Impossible Instant Lab will be hitting store shelves on August 29th, 2013 for a retail price of $299.
The Economist has published an article on photographic film's "transition from the mass market to the artisanal," writing that the future is bleak for film as we know it:
Consumers and professionals ditched film first. Then health-care services, which used it for X-rays, shifted to digital scans. The final blow came with the film industry's switch to digital projection. IHS iSuppli [...] estimates filmmakers consumed 2.5m miles [...] of film each year for the distribution of prints at its height. That was just a few years ago. By 2012 this plunged by two-thirds. In 2015 it will be next to nothing.
After Polaroid film died off, the The Impossible Project spent years rebooting the factories and breathing new life into old lines of instant film. However, the white-bordered film isn't the only thing Impossible has brought back from the dead. The company has also recreated Polaroid fashion from decades ago, launching the Polaroid Classic Factory Jacket.
ReutersTV shared this video today in which its Social Media Editor Anthony De Rosa meets up with The Impossible Project VP Dave Bias to talk about the company and what it's up to. Bias gives a demo of the new Impossible Instant Lab -- similar to what we shared from Photokina -- showing how it takes iPhone pixels and "melts them back down into chemistry".
The Impossible Project has partnered up with Japanese music producer and designer Nigo …
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Next time you’re on vacation and find yourself without a camera, try checking the mini-bar in your hotel room.
Polaroid stopped making instant cameras back in 2007, and ceased production of instant film two years later. Before Polaroid pulled …
In March, The Impossible Project announced that it had successfully brought …
The Impossible Project has done it again -- in a new Polaroid product revamp, the company has released a brand new Polaroid 600 One model designed by Paul Giambarba.
The Impossible Project’s new instant film for Polaroid cameras will go …
Time to dust off your old Polaroid cameras. The Impossible Project has just …
After Polaroid announced that it would stop producing instant film in 2008, a group called …