Polaroid SX-70

Polaroid launched SX-70 film in 1972 with the folding SX-70 camera. It was the first integral instant film: it develops in daylight, in the hand, with nothing to peel apart and nothing to coat afterwards.

The look follows from the chemistry. SX-70 is slow, rated at about ISO 150, and the dyes are gentle. Colour comes out muted, contrast is low, and the whole frame carries a softness that no lens setting produces.

Describe the frame first, because the frame is what makes a picture read as a Polaroid. Ask for a square image inside a white frame, with a thin border on three sides and a wide white tab at the foot.

Then ask for the colour: soft low contrast, warm and muted, with highlights that go milky rather than clipping to a hard white.

Skin comes out warm, soft and forgiving, with the texture smoothed away. Sky goes pale and can drift to a milky cyan, and a bright sky blows out early because the film is slow. Shadow detail does not reach black. It settles into a warm brown, and that brown is the clearest tell against Polaroid 600.

Use it for a quiet indoor picture in daylight: a person by a window, a still life on a table, a room in the afternoon.

Leave it alone for anything at night or with flash. SX-70 is slow and its camera had no flash in the body, so the hard flash look belongs to Polaroid 600.

Polaroid 600 uses the same frame at the same size, so the two get mixed up constantly. SX-70 is slow, warm and soft. 600 is fast, cool, contrasty and lit by a flash.

Cinema publishes Vintage and Vignette as separate entries at /techniques/cinema/. Vintage fades a picture and warms it. SX-70 is not a faded picture, it is a soft one, and it already darkens at the corners from the camera and the frame. A vignette entry on top doubles a darkening the stock supplies for free.

Polaroid sold the SX-70 camera from 1972 and the film outlasted it. Time Zero SX-70 film stayed in production until 2006, and the emulsion stayed soft long enough after the print appeared for people to push it about with a stylus. Polaroid stopped making integral film in 2008, the Impossible Project restarted the old plant at Enschede in 2010, and SX-70 film is on sale again under the Polaroid name. The square with the wide white tab is one of the few photographic shapes a person can name without knowing anything about film.

The model returns a white border of even width on all four sides. That is a print, not a Polaroid. Say a thin border on three sides and a wide tab at the foot, and give the proportion between them.

The second failure is a hard flash with a black background, which is the 600 look. Say daylight with no flash, and shadows that stay brown and open.