Hello filmwasters,
I sware, I never shot any instant film picture before in my entire life, so I was a real bloody greenhorn. I always thought, instant pictures are inferior and expensive, more or less useless. They are inferior and expensive after conventional criteria, but useless? How does it come that I changed my mind?
Well, I saw a lot of impressive pictures taken with the inferior technique, not least here at fw. Then I stumbled across a report somewhere about the future of analogue photography and the increasing sales in the amateur market. They also talked about instant film. I searched the web and found, that the Fuji Instax FP-100c is not so utterly expensive as the Impossible films and usable with the vintage Polaroid 100 - 400 series. On plus it's not the ultra-tiny Instax Mini format that I will probably never like. The image format is about 8x10 cm or 3x4". A quick search showed that the fitting polaroid cameras are rather cheap, the battery problem can be solved easily and a local dealer provides the Fuji FP-100c at a reasonable price - praise the lord!
A few days later, last saturday, there was a photo market near my town and I found a POLAROID LAND CAMERA AUTOMATIC 103 (so the entire models name) for 15 Eur. A battery holder for regular 2x AA batteries was soldered in place and a dry test showed that the shutter seemed to work fine under different light conditions.
polaroid land 103 by
imagesfrugales, on Flickr
The camera is really huge. The conveniant removable front cover has a clip to hold the instruction manual, but who needs it? Instead it's great to hold the pictures you just shot and take them home safely.
polaroid land 103_3 by
imagesfrugales, on Flickr
The outer surface of the triplet's front element is coated, so the lenses are probably made of glass and not plastic. I cleaned the lenses and viewfinder without dismantling and the finder is a plesure to use. The image is huge and bright with frame lines and parrallax compensation(!), the rangefinder(!!) has it`s own windows. Operation of the camera is extremely easy. The shutter speed is adjusted automatically from about 10 secs to 1/1200. color film = 75 ASA means that the lens is set always wide open at f/8.8. It also means that the images are not tack sharp and you get long shutter speeds of maybe 1/15 already in open shadows. The more sophisticated models with faster and better lenses are rather expensive. And I doubt they are much better, but will reveal the limitations of the simple construction.
