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Seeing this (C-12 scope camera) and the asking price. Why?

Is it the standard square polaroid film? You can still get that at like $20 for 8 shots.
That's why all the kids have Fujifilm Instax. The film is much cheaper!
 
The newly-manufactured Polaroid film is garbage by all reports. Apparently, the original manufacturing process was never made available to the purchasers of the Polaroid corpse. There are examples on the web of the new stuff being used in, say, a Captiva (which you can probably find for $5 or so) and compared with the original stock photos.

But with DSOs and digicams, why buy Polaroid film for your scope?
 
Chuck(G) said:
/--/ the Polaroid corpse /--/
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Much to the dismay of Edwin Land, an absolutely brilliant scientist. I owned Polaroid stock back in the day and it always baffled me as to why they seemed so content just making $$ selling their paper when they could have been a big player in the digital camera revolution. My very first digital camera was a Polaroid - 1.2 mega pixels or something - *drat* kinda of wish I had kept it around. I guess they thought that they could not compete with the likes of Olympus, Canon, Fuji...and so on.

Same with Palm, which I rode on to my benefit but when a bunch of them left and the rest were content to not put a phone in there, I knew they were doomed.
 
Part of the regular work that I'm doing is recovering Polaroid archives content for the Harvard Baker library. Most of it appears to be marketing, sales, HR and PR from about 1992-1995. You can see the decline due to "this is the biggest segment of our business, so let's not rock the boat" followed by reduction in employee benefits, etc. to save costs. By that time, it was apparent that the firm was headed for the dumpster.

Polaroid dumped Edwin Land in 1982 after a flop in an instant movie (8 mm-ish) product. Aftert hat, it seemed that Polaroid did less and less R&D.
 
Speaking as someone who got one at VCF West last year (I got the bracket too!), you'll be crazy to continue trying to use a camera pack on any scope unless for some absolutely demented reason you are not able to use any of the countless modern digital scopes that can not only save snapshots but entire sequences of snapshots to a USB stick. These are almost strictly for show and the aftermarket Polaroid/Impossible film is way too expensive per-photo to be wasting on waveforms.
 
Are any of the compatible scopes unique in some cost-competitive way to new scopes? Like super high-frequency or have some other unique features? Seems odd to me too. Unless of course they're waiting for some sucker who isn't able to upgrade (upper management says no) to a new scope to come around looking for a way to record traces.

It also appears this scope camera can use a 120 film back, which would be easier on the wallet than polaroid film, assuming you're developing yourself.
 
Mine (the C-50) fits on a 7000 series tek scope. They were really good at one point so I'll hand them that.
Unfortunately the scope has held up better than the camera itself. I found that many of the adjustment shafts were frozen and while not broken the plastic gearing linking it all together would jump teeth if you were too forceful. I'm sure getting all those adjusted again so for example the focus was correct would be a nightmare.
 
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Bentendo64 said:
Is it the standard square polaroid film? You can still get that at like $20 for 8 shots.
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They're making new i-series, 600, and SX-70 film, but I don't see any sign that they're making the old 4x5 "Type 100" film, which I think is what that camera takes? (This is the really old stuff where you pull-and-peel it.)

... Wait, no, there's an outfit that seems to be selling a compatible black and white film that's $54 for three shots? Man, you'd better really, really want a copy of that trace.
 
And I thought that the real film was expensive back in the day... Wasn't the price of film for the Captiva something like $5 a shot?

I recall using a Polaroid adapter on the back of a 4x5 Speed Graphic for B&W shots. Do they still make film for that one? Should I eve ask? I recall that stuff actually produced a usable negative. ("What's a negative, grandpa?")
 
Can you just remove the film camera and install a digital camera? I figured people wanted that stiff just for the optic lenses and sturdy construction.
 
syzygy said:
Much to the dismay of Edwin Land, an absolutely brilliant scientist. I owned Polaroid stock back in the day and it always baffled me as to why they seemed so content just making $$ selling their paper when they could have been a big player in the digital camera revolution. My very first digital camera was a Polaroid - 1.2 mega pixels or something - *drat* kinda of wish I had kept it around. I guess they thought that they could not compete with the likes of Olympus, Canon, Fuji...and so on.

Same with Palm, which I rode on to my benefit but when a bunch of them left and the rest were content to not put a phone in there, I knew they were doomed.
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Was that one of the Foveon Polaroid cameras?
 
Towmater said:
Was that one of the Foveon Polaroid cameras?
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I don't think so, but I can't remember well at all. I just went looking for some early shots that I still might have and what I can find easily is from 1999-2000 but it is from a Kodak DC210 Zoom (V05.00) [from the file info]. As I recall, that was the one I got *after* the Polaroid, but I searched for 'Foveon' and it was something like the x530 - I really wish I kept it - I think I gave it to a relative.

Did you have one?
 
Found the answer to my question:
Production of all Type 100 films ceased with Polaroid's bankruptcy in 2008. The last manufactured compatible film was made by Fuji until 2016.
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So--if you have some, it's likely expired.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Found the answer to my question:

So--if you have some, it's likely expired.
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I can assure you there is still a large inventory of it in freezers scattered about the planet. Problem is the pricing is now in the realm of people who don't mind a Polaroid costing something like $12 per photo. Brutally expensive. If we want to take photos of scope screens, there's a camera back option for still available 120 format film.
 
NeXT said:
If we want to take photos of scope screens, there's a camera back option for still available 120 format film.
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Unless you have your own lab you're going to have around a week's latency there, I guess one would have to assume that you're taking these photos to put in a manual or something, not to actually troubleshoot a thing.

Chuck(G) said:
So--if you have some, it's likely expired.
Click to expand...

I stuck a link in earlier to ONE INSTANT, which at least *seems* to still be in production. But it is positively loony-tunes expensive at around $18 a shot and it also gives the impression at least of being a very... "embrace the lo-fi" kind of product? Something tells me it's not really going to take well calibrated lab-quality photos suitable for mission critical work.

But yes, realistically this is all bunk, nobody's going to use this for real work unless there's some *very specific* application out there that wouldn't be suited to just buying a new scope that has a digital memory. A scope that would outperform what could realistically be achieved with this camera probably wouldn't cost much more than the camera and your first cartridge of expired film.
 
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