Comments on: The Unexpected Return of Instant Photography

By: Friday Grab Bag | Photodoto

Friday Grab Bag | Photodoto — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:49:56 +0000

[...] Technologizer laments the loss of Polaroid but shares new hope for instant photography in the form of the Fujifilm Instax 200 in The Unexpected Return of Instant Photography. [...]

By: nikky

nikky — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:58:25 +0000

I would like one they make people react different when you take their photograph with an isnatnt camera

By: Snafu

Snafu — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:36:15 +0000

I think it’s not so much ludditism as reliability. For example, we still send faxes from my workplace: we know that if we get a receipt okaying our sent fax it means the receiver machine has produced a printout and there is no way its owner can deny it is there, as opposed to all the usual email snafus we go through daily.

Having an instant photo print means no chance of error, malfunction or misplacement happening after taking a digital snapshot and before producing a hardcopy, which is rather important in situations such as CSIs. Certainly, there is nothing more straightforward that taking a Polaroid.

That Tomy thing is intriguing :).

By: MacHobbes

MacHobbes — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:18:43 +0000

Really great bit of history. “Ministry of Light Industry” takes on a whole new meaning…

By: Mitchell Burt

Mitchell Burt — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:31:52 +0000

NICE bit of history/trivia, Otis! Thanks for that.

By: Weasle

Weasle — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:19:56 +0000

cops and I think maybe one of the lunar dust labs use Polaroid just because it is what is done (i.e it’s tradition)… while some cops have a problem not having some kind of film or tangible object to hand… something that can be stuck into a paper file.

I know, you could put it on a DVD or thumb-drive and put *that* in the file, but these are hard-copy, all paper Luddites we’re talking about here… the ethereal nature of digital images doesn’t feel like evidence to a older cops.

Then when you take the larger justice system into account, you have to remember that evidence will hopefully be used in some sort of trial proceeding at some point in time. This means that cops are gathering evidence and data that has to go before a jury… and some juries are so dumb that they can be told by a slick defence attorney that if it’s digital it could be “easily altered” whereas film is somehow more “real” – which is just because juries are usually 12 dumbasses getting $2.59 a day to sit in a court room and act out their favourite t.v. crime drama.

On a totally different note, if it wasn’t for Polaroid, Veronica Leuken wouldn’t have gotten her magical Polaroid messages from Mary… which is just insulting to the B.V.M. and Polaroid manipulation art, both of which I’m into. ;)

By: Otis B. Driftwood

Otis B. Driftwood — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:05:19 +0000

Even deader than Polaroid are the Polaroid imitations produced in the Soviet Union. There were two of these, one copied from the original Polaroid technology, and one from the mature form. These were not compatible with Polaroid film merely because the sizes were slightly different. You had to use Soviet film. Unfortunately, no Soviet film was ever produced. Camera production was under the Ministry of Light Industry, and film under the Ministry of Chemistry. These two operations did not talk to each other, at least about matters photographic. One of the two models never saw more than a few prototypes, but the other achieved several thousand exemplars, not one of which ever took a picture.