It is hard to believe it but it is now
possible for you to fire off a cassette of
35mm colour transparencies, process them yourself in
daylight, and within minutes, the slides are ready for projection, using
your favourite S L.R. or Compact. Nobody is going to be surprised when I
say it is a Polaroid product.
The product is called, The Polaroid 35mm
Instant Slide System There ire three special reversal films available;
Polachrome CS35, rated at 40 ASA, for colour slides; next is Polapan CT35,
rated at 125 ASA, for continuous- tone black and white;. And, finally,
Polagraph HC, rated at 400 ASA, for high contrast line effects. I
understand that the three types of film are the same in principle I have
seen and handled the processing of the black and white version, and with
the colour version.
The film comes in usual standard 35mm
36exposure cassettes and will fit. any 35mm camera. Oh No, NOT in my
camera! I thought about. the old polaroid Swingers where the pods of
caustic photo-chemicals burst and spread on the picture area actually
inside the,, camera. Just the job
for my beautiful Seiko focal-plane metal shutter, I don’t think.
But worry not, with the Polaroid 35mm
system no processing chemicals go into the camera. Once the last, exposure
has been taken you rewind the film and transfer the film into a special
gadget called the Polaroid AutoProcessor. A little metal extractor comes
with the AutoProcessor so that you could extract the film if you
accidentally wound it right into the cassette.
Part of the Processor, contains a
processing pack which is supplied with each, film. The processing pack
contains the chemical pods. You wind the film as quickly as possible into
the AutoProcessor and after a minute or so (depending on the type of film
being used and the room temperature) the film is now ready for mounting
the slides.
Some cameras, such as the Pentax LX or
the Olympiks 0I4-2SP, utilize off the film metering for exposure control)
and may produce unacceptable results with Polaroid, due to a difference in
reflectance of normal films and Polaroid films. In other cameras where the
metering is measured direct by the light from the incoming lens you just
set the Camera as for normal films.
But now you start to worry if you are
thinking of buying this equipment. Here are Jessop’s prices:
AutoProcessor = £81.90, Slide Mounted, £14.95, Slide Mounts = £3.53
(per 100), Polachrome Colour l2exp. = £7.59, or 36exp = £10.59. Polapan
black & white film 36exp. = £10.59, (what, same price as the colour
film?), and Polagraph High Contrast 12 exp. = £7.57.
What about the slide quality? The
demonstration I saw was the Black & white, 125 ASA version. They were
quite reasonable, but not up to the Agfa Dia Mrect standards. Of course,
‘that is not fair,’ the Agfa B&W slide film is only 32 ASA and you
have to send. them away for processing. Polaroid say that their Polaplan
35mm has a resolution of 80 lines per mm. Not as sharp as a camera lens
but probably better than a projector lens.
A saving grace (and to me, the only
saving grace) with the Polaroid 35mm slide is the fact that you can view
them almost straight away and you can. process them while on location.
There was an excellent documentary
programme on the BBC a few weeks ago where a well-known photographer was
co-operating ‘with the RAF to make some stills of the Red Arrows in
flight, front view. The Red Arrows
had to be very close, right across the picture area, and there must not be
,any parts of the planes outside the picture area. His motor -drive camera
was fixed at the tail-end of an equally fast -plane and the camera was
loaded with a Polachrome CS35.
The idea was to make dummy runs with the
Polachrome, have a look at the angles he requires and finally adjust the
set-up while on the runway. When everybody was satisfied, the camera was
loaded with Kodachrome for the final shots. The Kodachrome film was flown
to Paris for same day service. Back in England the transparencies were
viewed and there was the picture he wanted. This is where the Polaroid
came into Its own, if he failed on the first day the RAF would tell him to
get lost!! Nobody can afford to mess around day after day with a flight of
Red Arrows to get the pictures right!!