Polaroids are not dead!

November 19, 2008 10:18 AM

Poladroid is a free app for your mac that lets you drag an image onto the polaroid camera in the corner of your screen. it then spits out a polaroid image that develops on your desktop. there's a flickr group for these shots already.

it's beta "but really works."

posted by krautland (39 comments total)

Wow that's... totally pointless.
posted by delmoi at 10:22 AM on November 19, 2008

why?
posted by 2sheets at 10:26 AM on November 19, 2008

Man, the 21st Century is not only odd, but odder than we can imagine.
posted by The Whelk at 10:26 AM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

agreed on it being totally pointless. then again what isn't?
posted by krautland at 10:27 AM on November 19, 2008

It blows my mind that the old Polaroid cameras are being completely discontinued. Things like this are proof to me that enough people love Polaroid as a retro-chic item to keep it in business.
posted by roll truck roll at 10:28 AM on November 19, 2008

They have photography on computers now?
posted by DU at 10:31 AM on November 19, 2008

This opens an entirely new way of seeing things.
posted by Senator at 10:34 AM on November 19, 2008

Thank God I have a PC.
posted by Pastabagel at 10:34 AM on November 19, 2008

I like how we moved from cruddy manual typewriters that smeared, and made uneven lines, and replaced then with highly sophisticated postscript fonts... that emulate old typewriters.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:39 AM on November 19, 2008

Catchword: skiamorph

Filed Under: English

Part of Speech: n.

Quotation: I got the word, and the concept behind it, from a book on materials science that I long ago mislaid. “Skiamorph” comes from the Greek for “shadow” (skia) and “form” (morphe). My long-lost book coined it for the unnecessary holdovers that show up when new technologies displace existing ones.

See: Non-load bearing or ornamental columns. Touch tone phones with rotary configuration.
posted by The Whelk at 10:43 AM on November 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

It's not authentic unless the images are blurry as shit and ten years later they're all cracked and faded. Oh, and ten of them should cost you about $15.00.

And remember, folks, you don't need to pick up your Mac and flap it back and forth. It's not gonna develop any faster that way.
posted by bondcliff at 10:46 AM on November 19, 2008 [5 favorites]

you don't need to pick up your Mac and flap it back and forth.

Now you tell me.
posted by Devils Rancher at 10:49 AM on November 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

I think it's cute. I am, however, a certified dork.
posted by monkey!knife!fight! at 10:53 AM on November 19, 2008

Even better, take a polaroid camera and hack in a tiny LCD display where the lens should be, pointing inwards. (You'll need to do some sort of optical lensing stuff to make sure the image comes out clear.) Attach the display and the shutter circuit to a USB script and hack Poladroid a little. Now, when you drag and drop the image to it, the LCD display will show the photo, and the camera will take a photo of it and a real polaroid will come out.

(DO NOT SHAKE)
posted by Plutor at 11:08 AM on November 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

And remember, folks, you don't need to pick up your Mac and flap it back and forth. It's not gonna develop any faster that way.

I'm surprised they didn't hack the Sudden Motion Sensor for that (like MacSaber).
posted by grobstein at 11:13 AM on November 19, 2008

metafilter: Wow that's... totally pointless.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:23 AM on November 19, 2008

Fuck this OSX only garbage.

Oh wait, actually, this is absurd. Nevermind, carry on.
posted by abulafa at 11:29 AM on November 19, 2008

This is like a "Vinyl!" plugin for a media player that just adds low-level hum and a lot of pop-crackle-click noise layers on top. As in - a perfect way to cash in on retro-fetishists, if you can figure out a way to charge for it.
posted by FatherDagon at 11:31 AM on November 19, 2008

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
posted by zsazsa at 11:36 AM on November 19, 2008

Things like this are proof to me that enough people love Polaroid as a retro-chic item to keep it in business.

The issue with integral Polaroid film is just that - the film. The cameras, at least the contemporary 600 cameras, are basically cheap garbage, no trick to producing them cheaply and by the truckload. The film, however, is fairly complicated, fragile, extremely expensive (generally about $1.30 a shot), and requires chemicals and manufacturing equipment that is (so they say) harder and harder to come by. All for a print that is tiny and lousy by contemporary standards.

The cameras that can take good, and even great, pictures, the SX-70 and variants, were expensive to produce, and the cost ended up being too great for consumers to bear in the face of 1-hour developing. The cheap cameras kept things going for a while, but they moved the Polaroid brand from the bleeding edge to the ghetto, and in the ghetto it has stayed. How could they revert to the high end now, especially when the company that owns them, is completely uninterested.

The company that owns the the brand is Petters Group Worldwide, they specialize in buying brand names that don't have functioning companies, and wringing the last bit of juice out of them. So, why should they invest in a dead technology for the (admittedly currently robust) group of people who are into Polaroid, particularly when the interest in the company is directly related to the technology being dead. They make decent risk-free money rebranding shitty DVD players from Korea, and their stockholders are happy.

If someone could put together a business plan with the capital to make it work, Petters has hinted that they would be happy to lease the license. Fuji, who makes non-integral instant film, and their own format integral instant film, seems a likely suitor but they are on record as saying thanks but no thanks.

This seems like a fairly cute little app, but I think, moving forward, this sort of thing is going to be the only retro-chic Polaroid that has any staying power.

Unless many stars line up correctly and the rumored Zink Polaroid camera (not the POS currently for sale) doesn't suck. Unlikely, but worth a dream or two.
posted by dirtdirt at 11:45 AM on November 19, 2008 [8 favorites]

Thanks for the response, dirtdirt. Interesting stuff.
posted by roll truck roll at 12:16 PM on November 19, 2008

For people still hungry for the integral film instant photography experience, Fuji is introducing their Instax line to the US. This is good news.
posted by zsazsa at 12:31 PM on November 19, 2008

BTW, check out this tour of the last Polaroid integral film factory, taken right before it closed its doors for good. From looking at it, one learns that the manufacturing process was outmoded, expensive, and required specialized chemicals, some of which are no longer in production by their suppliers. In any case, I'm glad Fuji is carrying on with instant photography. I love their line of peel-apart instant films.
posted by zsazsa at 12:45 PM on November 19, 2008 [2 favorites]

This is like a "Vinyl!" plugin for a media player that just adds low-level hum and a lot of pop-crackle-click noise layers on top. As in - a perfect way to cash in on retro-fetishists, if you can figure out a way to charge for it.

Is that anything like the "mp3!" plug-in I have for my turntable, which consists of me pouring Dr. Pepper on records as they play?
posted by anazgnos at 12:55 PM on November 19, 2008 [3 favorites]

Now if it just had a lolcats caption system built in...
posted by demiurge at 12:55 PM on November 19, 2008

Great post. I think this is an excellent and nifty little widget, as well as a timesaver for people who post-process their photos to give them the Polaroid look.
posted by empatterson at 1:14 PM on November 19, 2008

I'm not seeing the point of this, but then again, I like my images to keep their quality. What's wrong with command-click, save image?
posted by Hactar at 1:26 PM on November 19, 2008

> And remember, folks, you don't need to pick up your Mac and flap it back and forth. It's not gonna develop any faster that way.

While I wouldn't recommend shaking your Mac, if you grab a 'developing' Poladroid picture with your mouse and shake it back and forth, it does develop a little faster (though not enough that I would bother doing it, other than showing other people how enjoyably silly it is).
posted by djwudi at 1:30 PM on November 19, 2008

Even better, take a polaroid camera and hack in a tiny LCD display...

They already have these. They're called photo printers, and they've been around for a long, long time.

Before inkjets, color laser printers, dye-sublimation and thermal wax printers it was pretty much the only way to print a full color photographic image. The printing technology varies, but the main difference from regular-paper-printing is using carefully controlled light to expose pre-sensitized photographic print paper (Or slides or negatives, too) - as opposed to placing or fusing pigments on plain paper as in most printing methods.

I believe Polaroid made several models of photo printers that utilized various instant film stock as the printing medium.

*notes that the wikipedia entry for "Photo Printer" is hideously wrong*
posted by loquacious at 2:33 PM on November 19, 2008

Petters Group Worldwide, they specialize in buying brand names that don't have functioning companies, and wringing the last bit of juice out of them.
Thanks for that, I have been wondering who was behind the resurrected euro brands from the 1970s now on shitty $60 TVs
posted by bystander at 2:38 PM on November 19, 2008

I don't have a mac, but if I did, I would probably download the app. A lot of people in this thread are questioning its value but why does it need a "point" anyway? It's free, isn't it?

A lot of people, myself included, like the sort of post-processed look that Polaroids have...it exudes nostalgia. So it's a fun way to change up some of our favorite photos and someone's made a program that indulges our fascination with old polariod pictures. yay!
posted by pulled_levers at 3:34 PM on November 19, 2008

I almost posted this. I actually like it a lot. I wish it worked faster; I don't really care about reliving the "watch it develop" part. Here's a few of my photos I ran through the process.

(I may have a Polaroid fetish, though.)
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 4:18 PM on November 19, 2008

I like it. Thanks for posting.
posted by JessTortuga at 5:13 PM on November 19, 2008

Finally, a way to photoshop porn in the privacy of your own desktop.
posted by dhartung at 11:25 PM on November 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

I also like it, but only looks good/realistic with photos taken on cheap digital cameras, e.g slightly blurry and degraded with bung colours. Having to quit and reload the catridge is a bit silly after every 10 photos though.
posted by DOUBLE A SIDE at 7:56 AM on November 20, 2008

What's interesting is that, a few years back, Polaroid — in a last-gasp attempt to find a way to cash in on digital photography and keep themselves solvent — produced a digital photo printer. It was a pretty neat device.

Basically it was a little box that you loaded some Polaroid film into (I think it used the "600" variety) and had a memory-card slot, CF I think. It didn't have a full-color display or anything, just a little text display field that let you select the file on the card you wanted to print. You selected it, pressed a button, and it spat out a Polaroid version of your digital photo.

They didn't sell too many, I don't think, and they disappeared pretty quickly, but I always thought it was sort of cute. The whole device ran off of the batteries inside the Polaroid film pack (just like Polaroid cameras) so you knew it would always work, as long as it had film in it.

What impressed me the most was how good-looking — for Polaroids, anyway — the output was. The film was actually a pretty nice medium; the cheap cameras just sucked terribly, and gave the format a reputation for looking like ass.

Someone told me once that Polaroid had tried to market a line of instant X-ray films, unsuccessfully, which always struck me as disappointing. That seems like it would be pretty useful, especially in rural areas or in the developing world, where the problem isn't having an X-ray machine, it's having the processing equipment to do anything with the exposed films (which requires a processor and chemistry and someone to constantly monitor it).

A physicist friend of mine once built a data recorder for an oscilloscope that used a modified Polaroid film back, mounted in front of the 'scope tube (he did this back before storage 'scopes were affordable); I doubt this was his original idea, but it was pretty cool at the time.

Always sad to see a unique technology die. I wonder if Fuji will make film that's compatible with any Polaroid gear — the new stuff was trash, but some of the older stuff (and Polaroid backs for MF gear) was pretty nice.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:59 AM on November 20, 2008 [1 favorite]

Kadin2048, Fuji currently sells film for Polaroid packfilm cameras and medium- and large-format backs. Currently sold in the US are FP-100C (color), FP-100B (B&W), and FP-3000B (B&W). I prefer all of them to their Polaroid equivalents: they develop and dry much, much faster, and have self-terminating development. The color film is also wonderfully contrasty.
posted by zsazsa at 12:29 PM on November 20, 2008

This makes me think of a camera I once coveted, an Olympus C-211. Review
You actually loaded this camera with Polaroid film and it'd instantly spit out a print of whatever you took a picture of. I never got one, actually completely forgot about it until this post. But man, I always imagined taking a photo with friends/family around and being able to immediately give them a hard copy of their goofy poses.
posted by agress at 7:31 PM on November 20, 2008

My Baltimore friend Defekto will not be pleased perhaps.
posted by celerystick at 11:16 PM on November 20, 2008