It’s entirely possible that this might actually make sense. The Impossible Project, who, if you recall, has been reengineering discontinued Polaroid film, has developed a prototype for a piece of hardware that takes digital images off of your iPhone and prints them out onto their film. It’s basically a Polaroid camera that uses your phone as its lens and shutter, e.g. an instant photo printer. It’s a somewhat sinister idea in that it takes that special make every shot count element out of shooting on film, but I also totally want one because, well, I take a whole lot more pictures on my iPhone than I do on film and it’d just be pretty cool to print them out sometimes because it’s a different experience looking at an image that’s backlit on a screen and one in real life on a piece of paper.
The basic idea is that you take your iPhone, stick it screen-down in a kind of cradle sitting on top of a collapsable bellows, which is itself sitting on top of a kind of decapitated Polaroid camera (Impossible’s version of a Polaroid camera anyway, using rechargeable batteries). You slide open a shutter, and the thing tells you when the exposure (the second, analog exposure) is finished. You close the shutter and the “Instant Lab” prints out your iPhone picture.Impossible’s leader, Florian Caps (our Q+A here), explains:The Instant Lab is the Impossible answer to a question that we have been posing for a long time: Is there a convenient but truly analog way to transfer our everyday's iPhone images into these unique, real and magic photographs we love so much? The experience of now finally merging the digital with the analog world of photography using this Impossible machine exceeds our wildest expectations.This might actually make me slightly more likely to buy Impossible’s film, which is really expensive at $25 or so for eight shots. Not sure yet. On the other hand, part of the whole kick of shooting Polaroid pictures is that special few minutes waiting on a picture to develop. I guess I’ll concede that the end product is ultimately more important than the shooting/developing experience. Though, at the same time, I’ve had miserable experiences with the end products of Impossible’s film, including but not limited to pictures leaking photo chemicals all over and/or turning from the promised slick grey/silver to barfy orange.Right now, Impossible is trying to raise $250,000 on Kickstarter to mass-produce their prototype, which is set for release to the public next February at a retail price of $299. Though, if you pledge a minimum of $189 on Kickstarter, you’ll get a unit plus a voucher for a free pack of Impossible Project film. Or, you can pick up an old Polaroid camera at your local Goodwill for (often) one single American dollar and spend all that saved money on film. Perhaps the distinction is philosophical.
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