Working on a magazine, we tend to receive a lot of press releases announcing the launches of products but few announcing the discontinuation of them… On occasion however, some of these announcments are no surprise while others are quite unexpected.
Earlier this week, we got the news that Polaroid has decided to close the plants that manufacture the company’s Polaroid film. The reason is obvious—digital is ubiquitous.
According to an article in The Boston Globe, the manufacturing plants will close this year, giving Polaroid a small stockpile of film to last into 2009.
At one time almost every photographer—portrait, wedding and commercial—had at least one Polaroid back for their medium or larger format cameras. Instant film was a necessity—to check product or subject placement, lighting and focus—saving you from having to expose film that would need to be processed, and which could become expensive if you were shooting, say 8×10 chromes.
But digital has replaced the immediacy of Polaroid film, and you don’t even need to wait 45-seconds after you press the shutter, before you can view the image.
I suppose the second-hand Polaroid SX-70 camera I purchased on eBay a few years ago for fine-art purposes will now be a permanent museum piece next to the old Kodak Brownie I happened upon as a collectible. Sadly, I do admit that since I’ve gotten my first DSLR I haven’t touched my Nikon F3 or Bronica SQ-Ai.
Recently Kodak quietly announced the discontinuation of its high speed B&W Infrared film. A favorite of nature, landscape, and wedding photographers—there are now digital options, both hardware and software, to replace that old favorite too.
Although those icons of the past will be missed, the efficiencies of present day digital affords us so many new directions and opportunities. Some of these new products made their debuts at PMA last month. We’re bring many of them to you (see page 42 of the March issue of Studio Photography magazine) and will continue to do so in upcoming issues of both PTN and Studio Photography, and here on imaginginfo.com.
Best,
Diane Berkenfeld
Editor

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Diane Berkenfeld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.