Polaroid Announces the Return of the 600 Round Frame Instant Film
Polaroid has announced that it is making its 600 Film Round Frame Edition available again after ceasing production back in 2015.
Polaroid has announced that it is making its 600 Film Round Frame Edition available again after ceasing production back in 2015.
Polaroid Originals—the artist formerly known as The Impossible Project—made a sad announcement on its blog yesterday. After determining that the wide-format Polaroid Spectra cameras out in the wild "are now coming to the end of their useful lives," the company has decided to discontinue production of Spectra 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.
Big news in the photo industry today: Polaroid's brand and intellectual property has been acquired by the largest shareholder of The Impossible Project, Polaroid announced. Now a single family has control of both the Polaroid brand and The Impossible Project.
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.
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."
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.
Impossible launched its first lines of instant film in 2010 after acquiring Polaroid manufacturing machines and leasing an old Polaroid production plant. Although its efforts did bring "Polaroid pictures" back from the dead, its initial offerings suffered from poor image quality and slow development times.
There will soon be a great leap forward, though. Impossible is announcing today that it is launching Generation 2.0 film that promises to be better in speed, sharpness, and tonality.
The Impossible Project is continuing to branch out from the standard frame design for instant photos that made the original Polaroid pictures iconic. Last year the company launched a new line of film with colorful frames. This year it's the shape that's getting a makeover: the company has unveiled a new color instant film with round frames rather than square ones.
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 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".
At The Impossible Project's booth at Photokina 2012, there was a Impossible Instant Lab camera printer/camera being demonstrated. This is the device that was announced a couple of weeks ago that lets you quickly turn your iPhone photos into Polaroid pictures (i.e. Impossible's instant film or whatever stock you have left).
San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani, the guy who shot giant Polaroid photos of famous photographers holding their works, recently got his hands on Lot #1 of The Impossible Project's new 8x10 instant film. To test it out, Mantoani busted out his large format camera and 8x10 processor, and then visited a local surf shop to create a multi-shot panorama.
Guess who's back? Back again. 8x10 instant film's back. Tell a friend.
After successfully reviving various lines of instant film for Polaroid cameras, The Impossible Project announced today that they've created a new line of 8x10 instant film for large format cameras.
You wouldn't think the world of instant film could learn much from the world of beer -- and on most counts you'd be right -- but in this particular case, a little bit of Coors inspiration may have played a role in The Impossible Projects new line of COOL Polaroid films. The specialty instant film, part of The Impossible Project's Spring 2012 line, are kept in a temperature-sensitive package. In order to maintain its shelf life, the packaging will warn you when you're storing it in too warm an environment by displaying the message "Keep Me Cool."
Time Zero: The Last Year of Polaroid Film is an upcoming documentary about the death of Polaroid and the subsequent rise of "The Impossible Project".
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