Thanks for this update, Simon; thanks for investigating the possibility, all those involved at HARMAN. Although the outcome makes sense, it's still a sad moment.
Ah well... I'll enjoy shooting my Polaroids until the very last one.
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Hey, now Ilford can take all the money that they would have spent on setting up for Polaroid sheet film and spend it on fixing their equipment for making 220 instead! I want my 220!
Just curious, was anything discussed about licensing and possibly repackaging just the film portion of 665/Type 55? Rumour has it it's supposed to be Panatomic-X, or very similar to it, which might be fun to play with in other formats.
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"I must be losing it because I'd rather look at a cyanotype of fruit in a bowl." - jmal
I know this has been discussed before, but it would be amazing to have some type of low-speed (50 and below) 4x5 film other than efke. I've recently made the move up to 4x5 from 6x7 and I feel like the amount of low-speed films decrease in inverse proportion to the film size.
Are low-speed films harder to coat? I know that Pan-F cannot be made into a sheet film, is the same true of Rollei Pan 25?
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So what is Polaroid going to do with their highly specialized equipment for making instant film? They're going to sell it to a scrap guy for pennies on the dollar in weight, where they will be busted up and shipped in cargo ships to China to become WalMart junk.
So where is the substantial re-investment? Surely the equipment is the majority of the cost. A logical person at Polaroid would sell at scrap value or simply give the equipment to the other company, but knowing how bean counters think, it will get auctioned off and crushed before anyone else gets it for less than top dollar.
And that, more than likely, is what all of this corporate mumbo jumbo translates too.
PeteZ8, the substantial reinvestment is moving it all over to England, reassembling it, running tons of test rolls to get it working, bringing on extra staff to handle the pod and its own special chemistry, sourcing those chemicals in England vs. the USA, etc, etc, etc. It is so sad, all of it. But it makes sense.
Polaroid could have kept rolling for a while yet if its factories weren't worth more as real estate investments. Fuji has a line running. They have said they aren't interested in expanding their product line. Perhaps we can hit them up again.
Curious that you mentioned the substantial "investment to re-establish them at HARMAN technology's site in Cheshire, England." I agree that re-locating equipment and process across the pond would be prohibitive. This, to be honest, would not have been on my list of viable options.
I assume you did this, but I'll ask anyway. Did you look into taking ownership of the existing facilities and process (where ever they are located) and running production without any technology transfer between sites? I would assume this is the least cost option.
Someone asked about licensing and i'd like to repeat that question too.
I have a feeling that the existing instant film manufacturing facilities are integrated with other manufacturing lines, not being discontinued, that would make it difficult to separate or segregate. If that's the case, a transfer of technology bewteen facilities is inevitable, regardless (and cost prohibitive for any investor). It would also mean Polaroid will eventually decommission these lines. This sad news, but not surprising.
I think the issue is that Polaroid can get more by selling the land to real estate developers than a manufacturer would be willing to pay for the facility at the current location for the purpose of manufacturing, otherwise Polaroid would just continue to run the lines themselves.
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