No more Polaroid film. Do you like Polaroids

[Luckyflux]

I always liked the Polaroid pictures. They were cool and instant, and captured the feel of what was going on in an uneditable way. Can you photoshop a Polaroid? I guess you can, but how do you reprint it in the distinctive white border paper of a regular Polaroid?

Anyway, that is the one thing I like best about Polaroids, no photoshopping nonsense. So if you see a Polaroid of me shaking hands with Barak Obama it is the real deal.

It will be a shame if no one else picks up on the instant pics like Polaroid. I like a picture that you know is true.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Digital cameras are just as instant. Most of them let you see a picture right after you've taken it. Better yet, you can *delete* that picture if it didn't turn out well. With Polaroids, if you screw up, you just wasted the film - there's no way to 'undo' it.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

They're outmoded for good reason. Yeah, it was fun and novel to take Polaroids in 1978, but now in the age of digital cameras the idea of paying $12 for ten bad pics on little square pieces of paper is ridiculous.

 

[Mr. B]

I wouldn't be surprised if some third party was allowed to continue making instant 'film.' It is a shame they are discontinuing it, before they announced the cancellations I was very interesting in buying a Polaroid SX-70, an "instant classic."

 

[Alidar Jarok]

The advantage of a polaroid is that you can give a picture instantly to someone (with digital cameras, you have to print them somewhere). Plus, there's the whole "can't be faked" thing, but that just reminds me of the movie Shutter (and it was a shitty movie, so I don't want to be reminded of that).

 

[Locutus of Bored]

You can get a portable photo printer that's not much larger than a Polaroid camera to print digital prints out instantly.

 

[Hermiod]

I see mobile phone cameras as more of a direct replacement for Polaroids than digital cameras.

If you want to share a photo, or video for that matter, you can do so almost instantly.

 

[Philo]

^ That is a more apt comparison.

I wouldn't be surprised if some third party was allowed to continue making instant 'film.' It is a shame they are discontinuing it, before they announced the cancellations I was very interesting in buying a Polaroid SX-70, an "instant classic."

I'm really hoping that will be the case. I really love the look of Polaroids -- the aesthetics produced are really interesting and you can do some novel things with them. I was considering getting a Polaroid camera too when the announcement came down. Hopefully, Polaroid will license out the rights to make the film and some niche third party companies will start producing new stock.

 

[blablover5]

The cool thing about polarids is the artistic touch it can give. It's just such an iconic look. Luckily there's a free software download out there that will do that.

http://www.poladroid.net/download.html

But it only works for mac uses.

 

[Philo]

^ Hey, that's pretty cool.

 

[Trekker4747]

I have the SX-70 Polaroid Camera. Great, nifty, little thing. Haven't used it years, though.

This is kind of sad because I personally feel that a Polaroid photo is better than one taken with a digicam.

Digital Cameras are great and all but I'm unimpressed with the medium the final product is in. - Ink on paper. As opposed to real photography which is a chemical process burning the light onto the paper. I'd take the longevity of a Polaroid picture over something someone had printed off from an SD card at Wal-Mart anyday.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Digital Cameras are great and all but I'm unimpressed with the medium the final product is in. - Ink on paper. As opposed to real photography which is a chemical process burning the light onto the paper. I'd take the longevity of a Polaroid picture over something someone had printed off from an SD card at Wal-Mart anyday.

I have exactly the opposite attitude. All my photos are digital now. I don't have a single printed one in the bunch - even my old ones, I had them scanned, then I threw away the originals. And I prefer it that way. Takes up less space, much easier to edit, and the quality is just as good.

Longevity? As long as I keep my iPhoto Library backed up, that's all the longevity I need. With regular backups, longevity for digital pictures is pretty much forever.

 

[Sledder]

I have the SX-70 Polaroid Camera. Great, nifty, little thing. Haven't used it years, though.

This is kind of sad because I personally feel that a Polaroid photo is better than one taken with a digicam.

Maybe it's just the Polaroid cameras that I've seen but it always seemed to me that they produced an inferior picture to a regular camera and certainly to a digital camera.

 

[Mallory]

Without Polaroid pictures, amateur porn would have been practically non-existant in the 60's and the 70's, which would have been a huge disappointment during my childhood and teen years.

I'll miss them.

 

[WillsBabe]

I'm not a big fan of Polaroid pictures. There's something stark and voyeristic about them, like a moment trapped. I can't explain it, really, but I don't much care for them. It's silly really, since they are a nice momento of a moment and, before the days of shoot and print digital cameras, pretty much the only way you could get a photo developed quickly. I remember when one hour photo processing was considered the pinnacle of photo-processing achievement!

 

[Holdfast]

The end of the Polaroid film? Surely a Kodak moment.

 

[ManOnTheWave]

The end of the Polaroid film? Surely a Kodak moment.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagghhhhhh.


To answer the question, my interest in Polaroids is a vicarious one, through photographer friends who experimented in it as just another media option. Like posters above, I felt Polaroids were fun back in the 70s, but now I have a camera on my phone and can just email photos to friends. See the Polaroid go is akin to seeing the rotary phone go. It was a piece of my life, but not a hugely important one. It's passing will be just another fun fact in one of those emails you get in a few years. "Kids starting college today don't know what a Polaroid is and have never heard the word. Their whole lives have been digital."

Now I feel old.

 

[Trekker4747]

Longevity? As long as I keep my iPhoto Library backed up, that's all the longevity I need. With regular backups, longevity for digital pictures is pretty much forever.

It's been suggested that in centuries' time this time will be looked at as a "dark ages" because there'll be little remaining evidence depicting events of this time.

The photos you've taken are recorded and kept in digital form. But that file format will not always be supported. Some day, way down the road in the furture, every computer will look at a file with the extension "jpg" and not know what to do with it.

Someday, way down the future, you'll be long dead meaning every photo you've taken in digital form will be lost. You've kept it stored on hard drives which degrade and crash and don't last forever, on CDs -a format that won't always be supported, on a flash-drive another format that won't be supported, you have your photos on an iWhatever -a program that won't always be supported.

This is a pretty big problem. And even if you printed out those pictures that ink-on-paper won't last forever. Infact, it's pretty unlikely it'll even last your lifetime.

Taking a real picture on film and getting it developed produces a picture that is permanent. A picture that is formed on the paper using chemicals that etch the photo into the photographic paper. Permanently. Now, sure, even that can degrade or become ruined if not treated or cared for properly, but ink on paper is much more vulnerable and even fades.

It's not a permanent form of photography and that disturbs me. Future generations are going to wonder what life was like in this time and they're not going to know because all of our photography either degraded over time because of its poor medium or pictures are locked up file formats/mediums they can't access.

Nothing beats a good, old fashioned, photograph. Which Polaroids have over digital photography. It's more permanent.

 

[SeerSGB]

Good by good old Pornoriod, you'll be missed.

First camera I ever owned as was a Polaroid, I even have one of the first packed away somewhere- my grandfather's he bought with green-stamps.

 

[Holdfast]

The end of the Polaroid film? Surely a Kodak moment.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagghhhhhh.

I was rather proud of that one!