2011-01-12

Polaroid Grey Finally Revealed


004_1172591, originally uploaded by infrar3d.

CES came and went, Polaroid "Grey" was revealed, and there was no new film camera.

They had a long, strange press conference, and what we got was a new Zink printer, sunglasses with a built-in camera and a digicam/printer. Pretty disappointing. As I was reminded by a BJP article, they sold off the Polaroid Collection a few months ago to pay for this. I don't blame Lady Gaga, she's a twenty-something pop singer, I blame PLR IP Holdings. And Tom Petters.

Mic Wright has written an excellent article titled 'Look away while Lady Gaga molests the corpse of Polaroid' that pretty well sums up how I feel about all this. As he states in the article...

Polaroid and the last vestiges of its original form died on June 14, 2008.

If you love Polaroid, let it die. The things happening there now are just embarrassing footnotes on the bottom of Edwin Land's Wikipedia page. Go order some film from The Impossible Project, and let's hope they bring out the Type 55 Integral they've hinted at. They're also working on 8x10. Fuji still makes great instant film, both for their own Instax integral cameras, and Polaroid-compatible peel-apart film in 3x4 and 4x5. They're about to release their 3000 speed 4x5 black and white film in the U.S.

Or, go pick yourself up a copy of the recent reprint of The Polaroid Book. It's fantastic and it's also the best photo book bargain going right now, only ten bucks at Amazon.

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