12/5/2023 0 Comments Polaroid spectra system filtersThank you for your continued belief in analog instant photography, Oskar Smolokowski CEO, Polaroid Our manufacturing team led an intensive, 6-month testing and improvement plan on Spectra cameras and our film. We look forward to working with our community to test new products and to keep analog instant photography thriving well into the future. As we share in the sadness with our community, we continue to focus on the future of analog instant photography through enhancing our core range, and through continued work on our film chemistry. So today, with a heavy heart, we are announcing the end of production for Spectra film. After extensive testing, we have concluded that we cannot support these cameras any longer. Jamming and frequent breakdowns are now affecting the majority of these cameras, and unfortunately, this is not something we can influence with our film. With three decades behind them, these wide format cameras are now coming to the end of their useful lives. It's such a shame to see all of it thrown away now so the new company could make what is essentially just a clone of the cheap, point & shoot Instax models.October 2019 Dear Spectra photographers, Since 1986, Spectra has played an important part in Polaroid’s film offering and in the world of analog instant photography. I consider them to be Polaroid's last great milestone before their innovation really began to stagnate and the company eventually declared bankruptcy. It's not surprising since Spectras involved some pretty incredible engineering, both in the camera itself and improvements to the film at the time. These were marketed as a very advanced, premium instant camera line. That $329.00 price tag would have been roughly more than $800 today, adjusted for inflation. SE or "Special Edition" models usually just offered extended warranties or accessory bundles. The Spectra System SE was probably released closer to 1987, but it's essentially the same camera. They also had more setting options/features and offered more accessories than other models of the era. These cameras featured Polaroid's unique, previously developed sonar autofocus system (which detects objects with sound rather than light) combined with a revolutionary free-form lens design (which Polaroid called a "Quintic lens") that allowed for an impressive 10 focus zones in a very small unit and without having to extend or contract the lens itself. The decision to make a wide format film was most likely to fill a hole in the market after they successfully sued Kodak for patent infringement and forced them to discontinue their own instant camera line (Kodak instant film had been a wide frame picture, instead of Polaroid's square frame, with dimensions nearly identical to what Spectra would be). Polaroid introduced the Spectra line in 1986 with the original Spectra System camera. Personally I’ve always loved the spectra cameras and so even now that you won’t feasibly be able to shoot with it as easily as you can with a vintage 600 or SX-70 model, they still look very cool on a shelf. So currently today, the only way to get film for it is to either modify your camera to shoot Instax wide (which I have no experience doing) or buying expired film from places like eBay but this is both expensive and a dice roll on efficacy. They cited a lack of reliability on the hardware of existing cameras and their longevity as reasons for discontinuing it and then made that change permanent by retooling their manufacturing equipment from spectra to Polaroid Go film. However, Spectra film is currently discontinued. It was discontinued along with every Polaroid film in 2008 but the Impossible Project did revive it. The spectra system was a series of Polaroid cameras that shot in larger format instant film called “Spectra Film”.
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