Polaroid One Step Flash

We made an impromptu visit to our family in Southern California this past weekend.  We realized that a planned vacation next week wasn’t happening, so we decided last minute to pull off a quick weekend road trip.

My mother-in-law had recently given me a Polaroid One Step Flash camera so I figured it was a good opportunity to try it out. I bought two packs of The Impossible Project’s latest films, the PX600 UV+ Silver Shade (black & white) and PX680 Color Shade.

The camera worked perfectly fine. Or perhaps I should say it worked as designed since the One Step Flash is a rather run-of-the-mill Polaroid. The always-fires flash was somewhat annoying and resulted in at least one completely blown-out exposure outside.

The Impossible film is coming along but nowhere near the quality of the original Polaroid emulsions in their heyday.

I liked the Silver Shade black & white film a lot as it was fairly contrasty and the 8-pack only resulted in one image with a tiny undeveloped patch. Their Color Shade on the other hand seemed quite washed out, and about half of the pictures had fairly large undeveloped patches.

For instant color photography I think I will stick with my trusty Polaroid Automatic 100 Land Camera and Fujifilm’s excellent FP-100C film.

Perhaps the best thing to come from the Impossible film was a golden dark slide that came on top of one of the packs. This is a Willy Wonka-esque gift certificate to The Impossible Project’s store.

Based on a whim I used it to order some original Polaroid Spectra film which Impossible recently put up for sale.

Do I have a Spectra camera?… Not yet, but I’m working on that!